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By Root 1845 0

lynching, some based in the South itself, but these campaigns achieved little or nothing in the first half of the century.68 Lynchers were never punished. And when lynching itself slid somewhat into decline, it was certainly not because of anything the criminal justice system did. In May, 1930, for example, a mob in Sherman, Texas, lynched George Hughes, a black farm laborer accused of raping the wife of his boss. This charge was probably baseless, but a mob set fire to the jail, and burned George Hughes to death. Afterward, his corpse was dragged to a cotton-wood tree in the black section of town and burned again. And the police? They helped out by directing traffic.69

Lynching was outside the law, although the law did almost nothing about it. Inside the law was little better. It was the southern way of life to beat and brutalize black defendants. (The North was, of course, not blameless either.) In Brown v. Mississippi (1936),70 the Supreme Court confronted a case in which black defendants, arrested on a charge of murder, confessed after deputy sheriffs beat them repeatedly with leather straps. The transcript of the case read “more like pages torn from some medieval account, than a record made within the confines of a modern civilization.” In one revealing bit of testimony, a deputy sheriff, asked how severely he had whipped one defendant, answered, “Not too much for a negro.” The Court reversed the convictions.

The notorious Scottsboro case (see chapter 14) was a sensation of the 1930s. Nine young black men were arrested and accused of raping two white women on a freight train rolling slowly between Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Huntsville, Alabama. The two “victims,” Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, were portrayed as the flower of southern womanhood, in propaganda about the case, after it became notorious. (In fact, they were prostitutes.) More to the point, their stories were out-and-out lies. Ruby Bates later recanted. Victoria never did, but her story was a tissue of contradictions. It was obvious she was lying. In the event, that hardly mattered. After a brief trial, with the most feeble sort of defense, the “Scottsboro boys” were sentenced to death.71

This time, the case refused to die. Perhaps it was too blatant an example of Alabama justice. The Communist Party seized on the case, and rode it for all it was worth. Blacks and a few white liberals also joined the battle. The original judge, a fair-minded man, became convinced that the defendants were innocent. He ordered a new trial. A virulently racist judge replaced him. The second trial was grossly unfair. The defendants were convicted and sentenced to death—again. This case was appealed to the Supreme Court, which ordered a new trial. The defendants, said the Court, had never had effective counsel. This was, as we have seen, a landmark in constitutional law; but it did not end the defendants’ ordeal.

On retrial, Samuel Leibowitz, the most famous criminal lawyer of the day (except perhaps for Clarence Darrow), came down to Alabama to fight for the lives of the defendants.72 He was sure he could win; after all, he had an ironclad case. But he did not understand the code of the South. The jury convicted again. By now, the case had the status of legend; it was larger than life. The battle dragged on for years. Jury after jury convicted and sentenced to death. Every man on every jury was white, since no blacks were allowed on Alabama juries (this was not the law, but it was certainly the practice). Eventually, the state gave up on four of the defendants; and, in the end, all the “Scottsboro boys” went free. By that time, they had served, in the aggregate, more than a hundred years in jail for a crime they did not commit.

Why did the state of Alabama fight like a bulldog to put these young black men to death? There was a perverse kind of principle at stake. Many white southerners hardly cared whether the defendants were guilty or not. That was a secondary issue. The real issue for them was the southern caste system. They somehow believed it would fall apart like