Orville Gilley, the one white boy left on the train when the alleged rapes took place, had agree to testify for the prosecution. "My name is Clarence Norris, one of the Scottsboro Boys. Because of indifferent jurors and career-motivated prosecutors, the self-serving and groundless accusations of a single woman were allowed to change forever the lives of nine black teenagers who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.Plaque in Limestone County (Athens, Alabama) courtroomIt is easy, especially for a Minnesota native like myself, to look at the story of the Scottsboro Boys and to condemn a whole region of the country. The perseverance of the Scottsboro Boys and the attorneys and community leaders who supported their case helped to inspire several prominent activists and organizers. This became the issue argued before the United States Supreme Court in By the mid-1930s, even Leibowitz was forced to admit that he was more hindrance than help to the boys and he agreed to take on a southerner, Clarence Watts, as co-counsel. Two days later, eight of the nine stood convicted and sentenced to death, with their executions scheduled for July 10. When a reporter questioned how the jury could have found a guilty verdict, Leibowitz replied: "If you ever saw those creatures, those bigots whose mouths are slits in their faces, whose eyes pop out like a frog's, whose chins drip tobacco juice, bewhiskered and filthy, you would not ask how they could do it."
They had simply won the right to be retried.Meanwhile, the bickering defense organizations worked out a rapprochement.
In a prepared statement, the prosecutor pronounced Roberson and Montgomery innocent. (AP Photo)
And the white boy put on the stand “contradicted her.” Horton doubted Black boys would have chosen such an exposed place to rape white women. Why did Gilley suddenly appear as a prosecution witness when they most needed him?
You know damn well they lied that day at the Paint Rock station and the Price girl has been lying ever since. On cross-examination, Knight ripped into Bates, confronting her both with her conflicting testimony in the first trials and accusations that her new versions of events had been bought with new clothes and other Communist Party gifts. He stepped on the hand of a black youth named The "Scottsboro Boys" with National Guard members (3/26/31)Also greeted by the posse in Paint Rock were two mill workers from Huntsville, Why Bates and Price told what everyone today understands to have been a bald-faced lie is not known for certain. After Patterson lost his case, Leibowitz made his worst mistake at a rally in New York.
Knight ignored him and kept calling the man “John.”Fed up, Samuel lost his temper. You are not trying state lines."
Over the course of the two decades that followed, the struggle for justice of the "Scottsboro Boys," as the black teens were called, made celebrities out of anonymities, launched and ended careers, wasted lives, produced heroes, opened southern juries to blacks, exacerbated sectional strife, and divided America's political left.Hoboing was a common pastime in the Depression year of 1931. It is what I do and who I am. For this reason, the Supreme Court finally overturned the Scottsboro convictions.
Among his sins was asking the prosecution to address a black man as Mr. Sandford, rather than as "John," and questioning Victoria Price in a manner so discourteous that it made one Southern newspaper editor "feel like reaching for his gun." Samuel Leibowitz and Haywood Patterson with his good luck horseshoe He told the jury that the night the four were together in the hobo jungle, and while he began making love to Ruby Bates while Price did the same with Tiller. After Horton excused the young doctor, he was approached by Lynch who said he wanted to talk privately. They were held some 60 miles away and delivered to Scottsboro the morning of April 6 for their trials.In this April 6, 1933 file photo, four of the Scottsboro Boys prisoners are escorted by heavily-armed guards into the courtroom. The credibility of the farmer's testimony was seriously damaged by Leibowitz on cross, when he asked how it was that Dobbins could even be sure, given the speed of the train and his considerable distance from it, that it was a woman that he saw.