CHAPTER 8

Women and Scottsboro (1933)

The women who have played important parts in the Scottsboro case are spectacular contrasts.1 There are the two pairs: on the one side, the mothers who have been most prominent, Ada Wright and Janie Patterson, who have seen the slow sacrifice of their sons to a deepening class struggle; and, on the other, the two women who have led the boys to conviction, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price. Behind one pair stand the other mothers, and all conscious women workers—behind the other are grouped the ignorance and vulgarity of the bourgeoisie and the prejudice of the group that used to be referred to delicately as “the flower of Southern womanhood.”

The mothers have become symbols to us of the working woman lifted by catastrophe into the knowledge of her position. Mrs. Wright’s tour of Europe with J. Louis Engdahl has become a historic fact.2 A year before she started on that tour, she did not care or know about the issues that were to face her, the forces which she would have to fight to save a son. She started, with no background, and no assurance, on an international tour that was part of the wide appeal for the Scottsboro boys. She has been educated to recognize the struggle behind the case, and to enter into her part in it, by her own close and personal experience. Mrs. Patterson is rapidly repeating her career.3

But on the witness stand, the star witnesses for the prosecution repeat flimsy charges, and indict the nine boys. The two prostitutes are, unfortunately, more typical of the South than are Mrs. Wright or Mrs. Patterson.4 They repeat “rape” to a bigoted jury, and Haywood Patterson is again convicted.5

These are the two main parts played in the trial by women. There was also Carol Weiss King, one of the four I.L.D. lawyers who assisted in the final preparation of the defense, and spoke and worked for the boys’ release.6

But these women have immediate and personal interests in the case. To know what the woman thrown by accident in contact with the Scottsboro case must feel, we may turn to Decatur itself, a town with a recent and artificial concern in the trial.

The courtroom tells our story. During the court proceedings, there were three other white women regularly present: Joseph Brodsky’s sister, who sat near the lawyer on the official side of the barrier and who took a studious interest in the process of the case, Mary Heaton Vorse, of the New Republic, and another student.7 There were one or two stenographers, one or two town girls who came, dressed in starched new clothes, to talk and be seen and to see who was there. There were no women representatives of the industrial workers, nor of any workers’ organization or press. There were Negro workingwomen of the town, some quite young, some older, who brought their children with them. The women made up almost one third of the Negro court attendance, in a Jim Crow courtroom whose bailiff had forbidden the presence of Negroes. The white women were conspicuous because they were so few. And, during the testimony of Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, when the court was ordered cleared of women, there were no visitors.

The townswomen of Decatur are divided in feeling. Most of them, the crisp leisure class, the office workers, waitresses, are indifferent. When they do express an opinion, it is ingrained with prejudice. I talked to one woman who believed the boys should be free if they are innocent. But her reason was based on the fact that she ran a filling-station, and had seen hundreds of Ruby Bateses, of Haywood Pattersons, of homeless families, take to the roads, hitching aimlessly or in search of jobs, from town to town in Alabama.8 As we stood talking, she pointed down the highway. “There’s one, now,” she said. Far down the road walked a man carrying his coat, and a woman leading a small child. A Model T Ford sputtered around a bend. They hailed it. The man driving slowed down, stopped, let them in. They drove past the filling-station. “They come like that every day past here, sometimes one, sometimes two, sometimes with children,” she said. “They’ve been more than ever these last three, four years. And my husband says how freights are ten times worse.” But she was pushing the prostitutes’ testimony away, and excusing their position, justifying it, not accepting the innocence of the boys.

The Negro women of the town appear in numbers in and around the courtroom, and these numbers are an index of their strength. The working woman’s strength is an important factor in the case, since so many of its issues depend on women’s problems.

Indeed, the fundamental issues of the Scottsboro case are more clearly tied up with the problems of the woman worker than has been pointed out. The fact that the boys were dependent on their mothers in Atlanta and Chattanooga when they were sent by freight to look for jobs; the fact that prostitution has played so large a part, socially and in the case (here we can remember the State’s star witnesses in the Sacco-Vanzetti case, the Mooney case, and now the Scottsboro case, have all been prostitutes); all these should bring the case home to the woman worker.9

Our problem in the remainder of the battle is one of organizing and educating. In the North, we can rally, protest, be our classes’ voice. In the South, there is even more to do: the century-long prejudices must be fought even harder, the old cry of “Rape! Rape!” whenever a Negro is to be persecuted must be drowned out, the whole problem of employment for women must be examined, the facts of prostitution made clear.

These are less immediate than the day-to-day cooperation which must be given to the I.L.D. in the defense of the Scottsboro Boys. The case has long ago become the property of the working class. The woman worker must accept its problems and devote her energies to further the fight to free the Scottsboro boys, and to save the problems which have led to their condemnation.

(Unpublished, 1933)