by Alex Heard
Patterson was chased by a mounted trooper and arrested by a policeman who said, “Well, this is the first time I ever see a nigger bastard that was a communist.” For him, the experience was a one-way push into a life of protest battles, dangerous dissent, and front-line involvement in numerous historic fights over civil rights and civil liberties.
“I had come back to New York as from a university—but a people’s university,” he wrote of his Boston baptism. “I would follow another road of struggle. My law career had come to an end.”
The cause that really shaped Patterson was Scottsboro, a multi-defendant interracial rape case in rural Alabama that became a worldwide news story starting in 1931. He wasn’t on the margins that time. During the early years of this historic legal battle, which dragged on through most of the 1930s and into the 1940s, Patterson was in charge of a group called International Labor Defense (ILD), a forerunner of the CRC. The ILD organized much of the Scottsboro defense effort, which was aimed at saving the lives of a group of young African-American males who faced execution on a dubious rape charge.
All the tactics employed in Scottsboro—inside courtrooms, on the streets, and in news media—would be used again by Patterson during the later years of the McGee case, and it’s easy to see why: In Scottsboro, ultimately, they worked. Against the odds, and with significant effort from people who had no connection to (or affection for) the ILD, all of the Scottsboro Boys were saved from death. But there were important differences between the two cases, and as McGee’s defenders would learn, it didn’t always work to apply the same tactics, especially during the anti-Communist fervor of the Cold War.
The Scottsboro story began on March 25, 1931, when nine men and boys—ranging in age from thirteen to twenty—were arrested after hopping a Chattanooga-to-Memphis freight train that dipped south out of Tennessee on its way west. In the northeastern Alabama town of Stevenson that afternoon, a station master was startled by the appearance of several white hobos who said they’d been thrown off the train after losing a fight with a “bunch of negroes.”
The station master called ahead to the town of Scottsboro, but the train had already passed through. By the time it reached Paint Rock, twenty miles to the west, law enforcement officials had been notified and a posse was waiting. At first, the nine were suspected only of vagrancy and assault, but the stakes changed with the discovery that two female freight-hoppers were also on board: young white women in overalls and caps named Victoria Price and Ruby Bates. Price told a deputy sheriff they’d been gang-raped by the blacks. The men were immediately taken to jail in Scottsboro, the county seat, where a lynch mob started to form once word got around. Alabama’s governor dispatched twenty-five National Guardsmen, but the night’s chilly weather was probably more of a factor in the crowd’s decision to break up and go home.
Just as in the first McGee trial, the indictments happened fast, and the suspects were assigned second-rate lawyers. The cases were split up, with the first two defendants, Clarence Norris and Charlie Weems, going before a jury together on April 6. The atmosphere at the Jackson County Courthouse was predictably tense. Inside, the courtroom was packed with locals who wanted to see guilty verdicts and death sentences come quickly. Outside, thousands of people had gathered to take in the show, and by necessity there were armed troops everywhere.
Norris and Weems were represented by an elderly local named Milo C. Moody and a Chattanooga, Tennessee, lawyer, Stephen R. Roddy, who appeared to be drunk in court. The state’s star witness was Victoria Price, who testified that she and Bates were in an open gondola car with seven white men when a dozen blacks leaped over the side and beat up the whites, ejecting all but one. Price said two of the intruders were waving pistols and that they all had knives. She claimed that Norris came up to her and said, “Are you going to put out?” After that, she said, six men raped her.
As historian Dan T. Carter explained in his 1969 book, Scottsboro—a classic history of the case—Price’s testimony was controversial from the start. Two doctors testified who had examined the women within ninety minutes of the alleged rape. Dr. R. R. Bridges said that, based on semen samples he’d taken, it appeared that both women had had intercourse sometime prior to his examination, but he couldn’t say when, and he said there was no sign of genital bruising or tearing that would indicate sexual assault. “She was not lacerated at all,” he said of Price. “She was not bloody, neither was the other girl.” A second doctor, Marvin Lynch, concurred: “There was nothing to indicate any violence about the vagina.”
Bates testified the next day, agreeing with Price but giving different details. “Victoria gave a colorful description of a desperate struggle with guns blazing, a pistol-whipping, and ending with the white boys leaving in an effort to save their lives,” Carter wrote, while Bates described only verbal arguments and a minor scuffle.
Even before the first-trial jury had left the courtroom, the second trial began—this time, of a defendant who would become the best-known Scottsboro Boy, eighteen-year-old Haywood Patterson. Price testified again, as did Bates. Right after Bates stepped down in the Patterson case, the judge, Alfred E. Hawkins, was told that the jury in the Norris and Weems trial had reached a verdict. The Patterson jury was taken into a side room while the decision was read: guilty, with punishment fixed at death. Outside, the crowd greeted the news with a cheer, and it was obvious that the Patterson jury had heard the noise. This would come up when the case was appealed, but, for the moment, the verdicts just kept coming. Patterson was found guilty the next day, April 8. Five other defendants—Ozie Powell, Olen Montgomery, Eugene Williams, Andrew Wright, and Willie Roberson—were convicted on the 9th. A mistrial was declared in the case of Leroy Wright, who was only thirteen, because the jurors couldn’t decide whether his youth warranted a sentence of life in prison instead of death.
Judge Hawkins sentenced the eight men to die by electrocution at Montgomery’s Kilby Prison on July 10, but the case would go on much longer than that. As the first trials drew to a close, both the ILD and the Communist Party made public statements denouncing the proceedings as a sham, and letting Hawkins know that capable reinforcements were on the way to save the defendants’ lives.
After the first trials, the ILD entered into a struggle for control of the cases with the NAACP, which, though slow in responding to the arrests, indicated a strong desire to represent the Scottsboro nine going forward. The ILD prevailed, partly through old-fashioned persistence. Organization lawyers hurried south to line up local legal help, interview the defendants in jail, and nail down the cooperation of their parents.
But the ILD sometimes played dirty, and the NAACP’s mistrust of Communist legal-defense groups started with Scottsboro. On April 15, 1931, the Daily Worker went on the attack, claiming that the NAACP’s sluggish reaction time proved that its leaders were “traitors to the Negro masses and betrayers of the Negro liberation struggle.”
In late 1932, after the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the first-trial verdicts, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments in the case. In Powell v. Alabama, a landmark decision issued on November 7, the Court ruled that the defendants had been denied adequate representation, because the trial was rushed and unfair. “It is perfectly apparent that the proceedings from beginning to end took place in an atmosphere of tense, hostile and excited pubic sentiment,” the opinion said. “During the entire time, the defendants were closely confined or were under military guard.” Appointment of counsel happened so close to the time of the trial, the Court added, that it amounted to “denial of effective and substantial aid in that regard.”
As preparations got under way for new trials, the responsibility for picking a new lawyer fell to Patterson, who had taken over as leader of the ILD in September 1932. He hired a New Yorker named Samuel Leibowitz, a top defense specialist who was known for winning murder cases. Because of his clout and independent means, Leibowitz was able to take the case and keep control of it, something that wouldn’t be possible
for Bella Abzug when she represented McGee. He let the ILD know he was in charge, and that he would quit if their public statements and protest actions caused him any problems. With some exceptions, he got his way.
Not surprisingly, the ILD’s presence—and Leibowitz himself—angered people in Alabama, who didn’t like the idea of Northerners, Communists, or Jews coming in to interfere. During Leibowitz’s first courtroom defense—of Haywood Patterson in April 1933—his arguments so antagonized whites in the town of Decatur, that when Patterson was put on trial a second time, rumors started spreading about a lynch mob. National Guardsmen had infiltrated a meeting where some 200 men talked about killing the defendants and running Leibowitz out of town. The new trial judge, James E. Horton, stopped the trial to deliver an angry speech about mob action.
“Men who would join in anything that would cause the death of these Negroes not only are murderers, but cowardly murderers,” he said. “The soldiers and the Sheriff’s men are expected to defend these prisoners with their lives. Any man who defies them may expect to forfeit his life.”
Leibowitz had advantages that McGee lawyers like Pyles and Poole later lacked. One was Judge Horton, who put his career on the line to run a fair courtroom. Another was time: Almost five months passed between the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal and the second trial, giving Leibowitz ample opportunity to hunt for new witnesses.
He found some, and he used them to dramatic effect. Leibowitz took dead aim at the credibility of Victoria Price, attempting to prove that she’d fabricated the rape story because she was worried about getting arrested for vagrancy. One new witness, a hobo named Lester Carter, said he and Ruby Bates had had sex two nights before the alleged rape, near a vagrants’ camp outside Huntsville, Alabama. A few feet away from them, he said, amid a tangle of honeysuckle bushes, Price was doing the same thing with a man named Jack Tiller. As Leibowitz explained to the jury, Price and Tiller had a past—they’d been arrested in Huntsville in January 1931 on an adultery charge.
Leibowitz’s biggest surprise was the appearance of Bates, this time as a defense witness. Bates recanted her previous testimony, saying she hadn’t been raped and hadn’t seen a rape. During her time on the stand, Price was brought in to identify her, visibly angry that Bates was changing her story.
Bates’s testimony had elements that backfired, however, thanks to clumsy handling by the ILD. She said that, since her disappearance from Alabama in late February 1933, she’d been in New York, where she’d experienced a religious conversion with help from a pastor. Prosecutors said the ILD had arranged her trip north and had bought expensive new clothes for her, which left the jury wondering if she’d been bought off.
During cross-examination and closing arguments, prosecutors also insinuated that Bates was a Communist dupe. Wade Wright, a county attorney, called Lester Carter “Mr. Carterinsky.” Pointing at the defense table, where Leibowitz sat with an ILD attorney named Brodsky, he urged the jury to “show them that Alabama justice cannot be bought and sold with Jew money from New York.” The jury complied. On April 9, Patterson was found guilty a second time and sentenced to death.
There would be other ILD missteps: The most serious came in October 1934, when two ILD attorneys were caught taking part in a scheme to bribe Price to change her testimony. For all his skill and preparation, Leibowitz never won a jury verdict in the Scottsboro cases, and Price never stopped insisting that she’d been raped, so there was no neat resolution. Patterson was tried a third time, in November, after Judge Horton shocked everybody by setting aside his conviction, based on his belief that the evidence didn’t justify a guilty verdict. Horton was replaced by a different judge, and Patterson was found guilty a third time. But Leibowitz set the stage for another appeal, focusing on the same issue that Pyles and Poole would later raise in the second and third McGee trials: race-based jury exclusion.
The details were similar to what Poole would present in Laurel fifteen years later. During the trial before Judge Horton, Leibowitz had questioned county officials about why there were never any black jurors. He resumed this interrogation before the new judge, who ordered that the jury lists from Jackson County be brought in. Officials started reading names into the record, calling out the race of potential jurors as they went. For several hours, every name was white. Late in the day, the Jackson County circuit clerk read out the name of Hugh Sanford, who was black.
So? Leibowitz suspected that Sanford’s name had been added after the lists were first created. He brought in a handwriting expert who said that most or all of the names of black jurors had been inked in after the fact. The judge denied a motion to quash the jury, but Leibowitz had a winning issue for appeal. He argued the case himself before the U.S. Supreme Court in February 1935, a proceeding at which the justices took the unusual step of examining the physical evidence themselves.
On April 1, in Norris v. Alabama, the Court reversed guilty verdicts for Haywood Patterson and Clarence Norris on the grounds of jury exclusion. Even then, the Scottsboro mess persisted. There were more trials and more guilty verdicts, but by 1937, a combination of time, fatigue, and growing doubt saved the defendants’ lives. Four were freed in July. The other five were given long sentences and sent off to prison. Between 1944 and 1947, everybody but Patterson was released, though Andrew Wright wound up back in jail for parole violations. Patterson made the news again in July 1948, when he successfully escaped from Kilby Prison. He disappeared, but he would be heard from again.
Poole and London presented McGee’s third state appeal in late January 1949, focusing on jury exclusion, venue, McGee’s testimony about his coerced confession, the hurry-up trial pace set by Judge Collins, and the consent argument, which they handled more carefully than Pyles had. Mrs. Hawkins, they pointed out, had said herself that she stopped struggling in order to protect the lives of her children. It was a selfless sacrifice. But it still constituted consent, because the court had ruled in a previous case that a rape victim had to keep struggling until the act was consummated.
The judges ruled on April 11, dismissing all five claims and heaping special scorn on the consent argument. “Absence of resistance on account of fear caused by an assailant does not prevent [an] attack from being rape,” they wrote.
Reading between the lines, they detected an even more offensive argument. “The implication of consent here implies a rendezvous between appellant and his victim,” they said. “This cannot be true because in his statement to the officers…appellant said he stopped his truck and entered the home, when he saw a woman lying on the bed…. This revolting insinuation, in other words, finds no proof in support thereof, reflected by the record.”
The judges’ use of “rendezvous” shows that they thought Poole was implying that prearranged sex had occurred. But he didn’t say that, as he explained in a follow-up appeal filed after the court’s initial ruling. “[A]ppellant [argues] that the State failed to prove that the resistance persisted until the act was consummated—not that appellant and the prosecutrix had previously planned the act,” he said. This distinction mattered, because it clarified something that got muddied as the years went by: Poole never claimed that McGee and Mrs. Hawkins had an affair. He left the case before that became part of the defense’s story. Even so, more than any other lawyer, he would suffer professionally when backlash against this line of attack took shape in Mississippi.
The judges, unmoved, set a new death date: June 3, 1949. When the time arrived, the CRC asked the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay, a move they planned to follow with a formal request for full review of the case. But the Court denied the stay request on the afternoon of June 2—without comment—and in Laurel, preparations immediately began for carrying out the electrocution on schedule. McGee survived that day not because of meddling from Communists or Northern judges. He was spared through the efforts of John Poole, Alvin London, and a Mississippi Supreme Court judge named W. G. Roberds.
In one sense, what happened was a routine paperwork matter. B
y law, the state supreme court had to grant a stay once Poole’s appeal was signed and filed. The hard part was finding a judge to deal with it. In his interview with Spivak, London maintained that the judges “made it their business not to be available” that afternoon. The execution was halted with under five hours to go. McGee even ate what was supposed to be his last meal.
June 2 was a Thursday. McGee was taken from Hinds County to Jones at 4 p.m., in the custody of Sheriff Steve Brogan. A Laurel Leader-Call reporter, on hand to document McGee’s final hours, heard him pronounce himself ready to die, saying, “I’m not afraid. I’ve made my peace with the Lord. I’m not afraid of anything man can do.”
He was visited in the Laurel jail by Bessie, her sister, and three black ministers—tellingly, there was no mention of a wife being there. He ate at 5:30 p.m.: steak, fries, salad, and iced tea, which he’d requested to be “extra sweet.” He spent the next hour and a half writing letters, including a thank you to Sheriff Brogan for treating him decently. “I hope to meet you in heaven,” he said.
At 6 p.m., a “galvanized iron truck” containing the state’s portable electric chair pulled up and parked outside the courthouse. The chair and its switchboard were set up in the second-floor courtroom. The state’s executioner revved up the motor at around 8 p.m., testing to make sure the generator was ready to deliver its load. Though the executioner didn’t know it yet, by that time the whole thing had already been called off. At around 8:30 p.m., McGee was on his way back to Jackson.