Race and Racism in the Scottsboro Era (1930's)
William Loren Katz
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Yates would not be the first or last to see “the power of the state” as ordinary citizens of both races protested against both the hard times and racial injustices, nor would he be the only one driven to radical political action. In May 1932 the national Bonus Expeditionary Force descended on Washington to demand Congress immediately vote the bonuses promised to World War I veterans, but not due for ten years. 15,000 World War I veterans, including African Americans, marched on the capitol and NAACP reporter Roy Wilkins who visited their tent encampment at Anacostia met families that ate, cooked, and mingled across racial lines. African Americans, people told Wilkins, had been leaders throughout the march through southern states:

They were served meals in Southern towns, by Southern white waitresses, in Main Street Southern restaurants along with their white companions. They rode freights and trucks and hiked together. Never a sign of Jim Crow through Northern Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee or Virginia.

The Bonus Expeditionary March suddenly faced the full power of the state. On orders from President Herbert Hoover their tent colonies were attacked by U.S. Army infantry, cavalry and machine-gun units under Generals Douglass McArthur, Dwight D. Eisenhower and George S. Patton. (Crisis, 1931, cited in Katz, 1995, pp. 316-317)

A new spirit of resistance stimulated by Scottsboro case stirred African American communities to new forms of confrontation. At New York's Harlem Hospital, in the heart of the world's largest Black urban population, the main dining room was segregated. Then Salaria Key, 16 and a student nurse in charge of the fifty-bed maternity ward, decided to take her stand. In 1933 she led five other student nurses in refusing to leave a dining room table "reserved for whites only." When they were denied service, Key described how the six young women

"...rose quickly, caught up the corners of the tablecloth, threw it and everything on it to the floor. Everyone in the dining room was upset. We demanded to see the Superintendent of Nurses. She arrived shortly, much excited."

Key won support from some doctors and carried her campaign into that year's mayoralty race.  When the Mayor began an investigation, Key reported, segregation "was abolished in one day." Her campaign also won such demands as appointment of an African American dietitian to the hospital staff and increased authority for head nurses. In 1935 as her contribution to fighting Mussolini's invasion of Haile Selassie's ancient African kingdom of Ethiopia, Key organized a 75-bed hospital to send to front. (Key, n.d., passim; Katz, 1989, p. 25)

By September 1932 rising economic discontent spurred more Scottsboro protest rallies. 200 European cities heard about the Scottsboro case, often through the speeches of mothers and fathers of the jailed defendants. Monthly the world learned more about lynching in the United States, the complicity of southern officials, and the failure of Congress and federal laws to protect citizens of color from violence. (Kinshasa, 1997, passim)

Among dissident Americans, the Scottsboro resistance began to climb upward. That November the U.S. Communist Party convention nominated James Ford as its candidate for Vice President, the first time an African American was thus honored by a political party. In the November election Ford and his party received 102,000 votes. But it was the Democrats and FDR who sailed to power, mainly on a wave of revulsion against Herbert Hoover's failed economic policies and the stony indifference of Republicans to mass suffering.

Dramatic changes in the Scottsboro case followed on the heels of the Democratic electoral victory. In February Ruby Bates, repudiated her charge of rape against the Nine defendants, in March the ILD retained the services renowned criminal lawyer Samuel Leibowitz. Though an all-white jury again found the Nine guilty, several months later in an unprecedented decision, Alabama circuit Judge James E. Horton overturned the March 1933 verdict and ordered a new trial.

New thinking about race, largely generated by Scottsboro and the Great Depression, swept into the White House with President Franklin Roosevelt. In 1933 Roosevelt appointed an advisory "Black Brain trust" to recommend proposals on racial issues. FDR rarely acted on their advice, and his New Deal legislative proposals never sought to reverse segregation or advance racial equality. The New Deal did provide emergency aid to African Americans, but less than it gave did white citizens. The National Recovery Act, the CCC, TVA and other government relief agencies aided people of color, but made sure whites received proportionately more. The New Deal's Social Security law virtually excluded most people of color since it denied coverage to domestic and farm workers, occupations comprised largely of people of color. By November 1934 Walter White of the NAACP warned Eleanor Roosevelt in a letter the New Deal administration was "led astray by those for selfish reasons want to perpetuate a racial distinction which can only do harm to the country as a whole as well as to Negroes." (Wolters, 1970, p.128)

During the New Deal years Representatives and Senators -- elected from southern states in which few if any African Americans were permitted to vote -- dominated House and Senate committees. Neither FDR nor any President had ever suggested enforcing the Fourteenth Amendment that mandated reducing Congressional delegations for states that limited voting rights. [Sullivan, 1996, passim] When Walter White of the NAACP asked President Roosevelt to support the Dyer anti-lynching bill, the President had a short, firm answer: “If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now southern congressmen will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can't take that risk” (Katz, 1995, p. 400)

However, one unelected white person with access to political power took that chance. Eleanor Roosevelt championed the causes of justice, equality and integration, and befriended African American leaders such as Mary McCloud Bethune. She denounced lynching, advocated for the Scottsboro defendants, and personally challenged segregation in the South and North. She spoke her mind to her husband, the President, whose response to her activism was "It's a free country lady."

The Republicans were driven from power, more white and Black people willing to unite for justice and racial equality, and Harlem residents swung into new forms of resistance. In 1934 young Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. led “Don't Buy Where You Can't Work” picket lines on 125th Street that finally allowed Black residents of the busy business area to work where they shopped. (Naison, 1983, pp. 117-118) Powell was elected to the New York City Council in 1941 where I saw him working with a handful of independent politicians - a dissident Republican, a Liberal Party councilwoman, and later a Communist — to loosen Tammany's iron grip on city power. Powell was elected to Congress, and just before World War II ended, he took his seat as the second African American elected by a northern district. In the city council Powell was succeeded by his protégé, Benjamin J. Davis, the Communist attorney from Atlanta who successfully won Angelo Herndon's his freedom from a jail in Georgia. It was Davis who introduced and secured passage - with the aid of Peter Cacchione, an Italian American Communist councilman, of the first law mandating celebration of Negro History Week in the city's schools. [Davis, 1969, passim.]

The Scottsboro and Herndon cases burst on the international scene as fascism came to power in Nazi Germany, and Hitler and Mussolini began their march across the face of Europe. As the battle to save the Scottsboro defendants circled the globe, it was adopted by the “Popular Front” forces that here at home and in European countries had united to fight the menace of fascist racism and imperialism. Italy's brutal invasion of Haile Selassie's Ethiopia in 1935 led to the mobilization of thousands in urban African American communities, but Mussolini triumphed to quickly for them to send much help or reach that distant battlefront.

But the next time fascism moved was different. Francisco Franco, and Spain's leading Generals in 1936 commandeered the country's armed forces to overthrow the legally elected Republican government. 40 transport planes supplied by Hitler and Mussolini flew Franco's 70,000 troops from Morocco to Spain. Franco's march on Madrid was joined by 78,000 Italian troops returning from victory over Ethiopia, 10,000 from fascist Portugal, 18,000 from Nazi Germany and Hitler's Luftwaffe provided air cover. However, 40,000 volunteers from 52 countries, most without military training, rushed in ready "to bury world fascism at the gates of Madrid." Saying, "It ain't Ethiopia but it will have to do," about 90 African Americans were among the 2800 other Americans who joined the Lincoln Brigade in defense of the Republic. (Carroll, 1994, passim)

The governments of England, France and the United States stood by as fascist armies neared Madrid. The U.S. sold Franco all the trucks and oil he needed, and even made it illegal for American volunteers to enter Spain. France sealed its border to Spain.

During New York's hot summers I would swim at the Carmine Street pool in Greenwich Village. One day in 1938 I bumped into my father's best friend, Ernie Crichlow, at poolside sitting next to another Black man named Joe Taylor and we talked. That night when I told my father Ernie introduced me to Joe Taylor, he told me that Joe, a Scottsboro activist, served with the Lincolns in Spain, had been wounded in the shoulder, and escaped capture by swimming the Ebro River. Joe Taylor had renewed his efforts on behalf of the jailed Scottsboro defendants.

Over the years I met meet other Black and white Lincolns. Then in 1986 when I joined a Lincoln veterans' picket line protesting a slanderous article about one of their beloved comrades, Oliver Law, a former U.S. soldier who could not rise above sergeant because he was an African American. The Lincoln Brigade was integrated from top to bottom and Law, a Black Communist from Chicago, had been active in the Scottsboro defense and organized Chicago rallies protesting the invasion of Ethiopia. In 1937 Law made history when he was chosen to be the commander of the Lincoln Brigade - the first time a Black man led an integrated American army, and the year General Colin Powell was born. On the picket line that day I also met Black veterans Jim Yates, Vaughn Love, and their white comrades. All had been Scottsboro partisans — as had just about all the Americans who went to Spain. [Katz, 1989, 42-45, et passim.]

It proved easy for Scottsboro partisans to internationalize and raise their fight to a munitions-grade level in Spain. Abe Lewis, born to an Alabama sharecropper family did not have a pair of shoes until he was 16, and was active in Scottsboro before he left for Spain. Nurse Salaria Key, was one of 70 American women who rushed to Spain. A fascist bombing of her hospital buried her in the rubble, but she emerged to fight again in World War II. [Keys, n.d., passim] Scottsboro activist Max Coad, shot at by white deputy sheriffs in Alabama, left for Spain with four of his white comrades. He explained:

I thought here was a chance to show the Negro what role he had to play on the international field against fascism which would give him a better understanding on how to fight against fascism... at home.” (Daily Worker, Feb 11, 1939, in Brandt, n,d, passim)

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