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[Remarks prepared for delivery at the "Scottsboro Then and Now" 2006 Conference at John Jay College for Criminal Justice in New York City.] I would like to talk about race, racism and the United States during the unfolding of the Scottsboro case. Since it is not often that an historian has a chance to speak from personal experience about the era under discussion, I intend to weave personal recollections into my narrative. This case of African American youths caught in the web of southern injustice, sentenced to death, thrown into a prison system that refused to recognize their humanity or their inalienable rights, shocked citizens of this country and people all over the world. At home Scottsboro intruded into the cultural, political and intellectual development of millions, particularly whites who had hardly given racial matters much thought. As a child growing up in the early 1930s, the nine Black youths, both as persecuted defendants, and as the heart of a resistance movement, shook the world, and shaped me and so many others. (Kinshasa, 1997, passim) It probably began for me on May 1, 1936 when as a boy of nine I was taken by my father, Ben, to the May Day parade. He also brought his eight-millimeter movie camera to take in the day's exciting march against racism, fascism and for a world run collectively by working men and women. Ben Katz's grainy, black and white, silent film recorded far more than my first day of political activism. Its wandering eye snapped two sequences of historic significance. In the line of march that day it caught an instance of "street theater." A young lanky, young white man casually shouldering a rifle and cast as a chain gang guard marches ominously behind a young Black man who is dragging a ball and chain. This duo symbolized the unequal southern justice visited on people of color - and that Scottsboro activists eagerly revealed to the world. I am sure other signs said, "Free the Scottsboro Boys!" Standing in stark contrast to May Day 1936 was the 1932 Hollywood movie “I Am A Fugitive from a Chain Gang” starring Paul Muni. This film was about white people caught in the southern prison web. What could you expect from Hollywood? At least it highlighted a vicious system, though it cravenly sidestepped mentioning that its major victims did not resemble Paul Muni. Undoubtedly it was "inspired by a real event" - Scottsboro's worldwide impact. Timid on race, "I Am A Fugitive from a Chain Gang" was at least an in-your-face look at the depravity of southern chain gangs. The other significant sequence Dad's 8-MM camera captured was the dozens of well-dressed Black men and women who proudly marched under a large banner reading "Negro Theater." I do not believe it was accidental that Ben Katz's camera that day zeroed in on actors and others associated with African American theater arts productions. By that time Dad was moving from his love for jazz music to devoting his energy and his free time to combating the special racist rules imposed on artists of color. In a few years he would become first a founding member of the Artists Union and soon after that a founding member of the Committee for the Negro in the Arts [CNA]. In the CNA he would join such notables as writers Frank Silvera and Walter Christmas, artists Charles White and Ernest Crichlow, dancer Janet Collins, and others. Their work would inspire a generation of such talented young figures as William Marshall, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier and Alice Childress. And in 1947 they and Frank Silvera would become the cast of a Black History play at the Schomburg Library written by Ben Katz and Walter Christmas. Dad saw the CNA as his most significant work, far more meaningful than his job as art director for an advertising agency. That May Day demonstration was one of many efforts to insure that the evil represented by Scottsboro constantly confronted an insular, complacent white citizenry. Though I do not recall any at this late date, I am sure the line of march included many signs protesting Scottsboro and the jailing in 1933 of Angelo Herndon, 19, a former African American coal miner. Herndon was Communist organizer arrested in Atlanta, Georgia for leading a march of hungry and jobless black and white workers — and was convicted under an Alabama law banning slave revolts! The co-joined battles to free the Scottsboro defendants and save Herndon from a Georgia chain gang popularized the 1930s slogan "Black and White Unite and Fight." (Herndon, 1969 iii-vi, et passim) The Scottsboro case arrived on the American scene along with the onset of the widespread economic and psychic distress known as the Great Depression. The Nine Scottsboro youths, the white boys and men, and the white women traveling on that fateful train in Alabama were part of a massive effort by the jobless to find something to do, some work, some way to feed themselves. The years of 1931 and 1932 were probably the worst in peacetime American history. Family suffering and dislocation was intense and it seemed like half the country, especially the desperate young, had clambered aboard a train to hitch an illegal ride to some where else. Radicals who marched in the May Day Parade and many other Americans disgusted with the direction of the country saw the battle against the hard times and the country's racial travesty as inseparable. I remember a popular song of the day that people invoked in the battle against both tragedies: "We're in the same boat brother, and you can't rock one end without rocking the other." The long battle that finally won the release of the Scottsboro Nine and Angelo Herndon took on an American political system poisoned by decades of racism under girded by a system of laissez-faire capitalism. The Scottsboro defendants went to jail during the era of radio's immensely popular "Amos and Andy" in which white actors imitated African Americans in a clowning way that relied on slurred words, simple-minded language and stereotypes of African American men as primitive, ignorant, and slothful. But as "Amos and Andy" sailed over the airways each week into millions of homes, its stereotypes were actually an improvement over another vehicle of racial propaganda that had been making its way into hearts and minds for a generation. Hollywood's Birth of A Nation, released in 1915, was still showing in Atlantic City when my grandfather took me there in the middle-thirties, and at a state fair I visited in later in the decade. Birth of A Nation was more innovative and effective that any previous movie. It dealt with race by creating a nightmare scenario and graphically thrusting it on the silver screen before millions of people sitting in darkened theaters in every state. Its story line focused on the brief period after the Civil War called Reconstruction when formerly enslaved men were granted the right to vote in southern states. It made no mention that the poor whites and African Americans of the Reconstruction governments built school systems, modernized state institutions, roads, public buildings, tax codes, and advanced women's rights. Birth of A Nation instead claimed that Black men who gained their political rights mainly wanted to rape white women, and had to be stopped by massive white violence. The first full length American film [254 minutes], the first to pursue a single dramatic story through a carefully developed cast of characters, was our first monster movie, but it was also so much more. Its distorted history made a terrifying, violent contribution to racial discord. And it used two devastatingly effective techniques: first it claimed to be a kind of documentary by featuring pictures of President Lincoln, the Civil War and other events from history. Second, it employed never-before-seen, electrifying cinematic procedures to drive home its points. Birth of A Nation presented African Americans as an ignorant, demented, loathsome, inhuman species that posed a clear danger to white women. Black legislators are shown chewing on chicken bones and passing laws legitimizing interracial marriage. Appearing in theaters as the country prepared to enter "the war to make the world safe for democracy," this film offered its message about democracy: political power excites Black lust for white women. The tale cast on the silver screen not only undermined any movement toward equality in the land of the free, but appeared to justify lynching and race riots as necessary to combat this menace to civilized society. At the climax of Birth of A Nation the Black Lt. Governor of South Carolina, with rape on his mind, pursues little, blonde Flora Cameron, who leaps to her death. The gallant white men who ride in to save civilization are the Ku Klux Klan. When Birth of A Nation was shown at the White House, President Woodrow Wilson called it "history written in lightening" and pronounced it "terribly true." (Carnes, 1995, pp. 136-138) As the Hollywood producers of Birth of A Nation counted their enormous profits, hucksters used the wave of bigotry the film created to launch a new Ku Klux Klan, one that demonized people of color, immigrants, Catholics, Jews, trade unionists, independent women and others considered foes of "God and family." By the 1920s untold millions were made by KKK organizations selling memberships for $10 and uniforms for $6. Klan organizers recruited an estimated six million people in all 48 states, one in four Protestant men. Klansmen ran state governments from Indiana and Oklahoma to Oregon, and claimed dozens of Senators, Jurists, and Congressmen, and hundreds of local officials. In 1924 40,000 Klansmen massed along Pennsylvania Avenue, and Klan power forced the Democratic and Republican conventions to vote down resolutions to condemn the KKK by name. That year intolerance advanced on other fronts when Congress used racial and ethnic quotas and passed this country's most restrictive immigration law, and a Tennessee court convicted and fined a high school science instructor for teaching evolution. (Allen, 1959. p. 54) The expanded Klan program of the 1920s, the decade of my birth, might have been written by the three Presidents of the time. Warren Harding had warned about "racial differences;" Calvin Coolidge had warned Nordics would "deteriorate when mixed with other races;" and Herbert Hoover warned immigrants "they would be tolerated only if they behaved." His hand on the White House Bible, President Harding was inducted into the Klan kneeling on the floor of the Green Room. (Allen, 1959, p. 54) As attorneys and political partisans of the Scottsboro Nine and Herndon struggled to save them, Hollywood unfurled another saga of white southern gallantry and Black slavishness: the 1939 blockbuster, Gone With the Wind. This film gushed nostalgia for the gallant slaveholder class and the era of human bondage. (Carnes, 1995, pp. 132-141) What were racial relations like on the ground when the Scottsboro Nine were arrested and as the Great Depression seized hold? An eight to one Supreme Court ruling in the Plessy case in 1896 held segregation was Constitutional anywhere in the United States. In 1931 the Plessy decision was not only the law of the land, but was lauded by prominent politicians of both parties as beneficial, and the very foundation of sound racial policy. When white public officials spoke about “the American way of life” they meant prosperity and liberty, discrimination and segregation. 22 major labor unions discriminated against people of color in their Constitutions or by-Laws. Congress repeatedly refused to pass the Dyer anti-lynching law or to legislate against any form of discrimination. Southern politicians often dominated key House and Senate committees, controlled the Democratic Party and used their power to block any legislation that threatened their "way of life." Knowing they faced no federal interference states leaped into the act of dispensing death for "alleged" rapes: between 1930 and 1939 states executed ten whites and 115 Black men for rape. In 1930 "at least 20 blacks had been lynched." In the South where 80% of Black people lived, white education received three times as much as black education, and 94% of people of color were illiterate. (Franklin, 2005, p. 44) The onset of the Great Depression's struck African Americans far more severely than whites. This can be read the percentages of Black unemployed people north and south. The Urban League reported for 1930:
From the Atlantic to the Pacific states, the life of African Americans was painful, brutish and short. While there was one hospital bed available for every 139 whites, there was one hospital bed available for every 1,941 African Americans. Men, women and children of color were mocked, stereotyped and belittled on the Amos and Andy Show, and in cartoons, news reports, songs, jokes, post cards and nursery rhymes, and insulted and abused by politicians, arresting officers, judges and jailers. Throughout the 1930s white southern judges known for their bigotry were appointed to the federal bench in the New York City. But another America emerged during the Great Depression that was ready to challenge both the hard times and ingrained racism. The deep suffering of ordinary people provoked new ways of thinking and acting beneath the marble corridors of power. As Langston Hughes noted, the hard times "brought everyone down a peg or two," and people of color suddenly had a lot of company on the bottom rungs of the ladder, white people who wondered what had happened to their special privileges. |
Essays | History
Race and Racism in the Scottsboro Era (1930's)