Close-Up (Mar-Dec 1933)

CLOSE UP 277 The task of the International Labor Defence has been colossal. Huge sums have had to be raised for legal costs. It has had to fight the reactionary National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (a Negro organisation which, in the face of all cases to the contrary that are piling up still treacherously avers that " justice and fair-mindedness " towards the Negro can be obtained in southern courts). It has organised mass meetings all over the United States at which the parents of the boys, southern-state Negroes who had never left home and virtual slavery, have aroused the indignation of millions. It has sent Ada Wright, mother of two of the boys, and J. Louis Engdahl, its secretary, to 13 European countries in the summer of 1932, where both encountered every obstacle the governments of these countries could put in their way, from attempts to debar them to imprisonment. And everywhere Mrs. Wright and Engdahl have stirred up mass indignation. In November, 1932, the case was brought to the Supreme Court in Washington which granted a re-trial, and this took place in April of this year. Decatur is about 50 miles from Scottsboro, and it was obvious that the same frenzied lynch-spirit would exist there. The defence lawyers had demanded but been refused charge of venue to the big town of Birmingham. A small country town, as like Scottsboro as possible, best suited the Alabama authorities. They were more than ever bent on killing these Negroes. The first week was spent mainly on arguing legal points. Defence attorney Samuel Leibowitz kept on asking for the jury-roll to be produced in court — 5,000 names of jurors and not a Negro amongst them. He asked for the quashing of the indictment on Heywood Patterson, the first boy to be re-tried, on grounds of this illegality of exclusion of Negro jurors. This was overruled by judge Horton. They brought the boys into Decatur and lodged them in the jail. Having spent over two years in a prison staring at the electric chair, now, by chance, they found their cells faced an old painting of a gallows. As at Scottsboro the town was like an armed camp. While Ruby Bates was repudiating the lies of her first evidence two lynch mobs formed and came towards the town because " the trial was taking too long." The militia stopped them. Military and state authorities kept on telling the reporters to keep as quiet as possible about the whole proceedings. Leibowitz, other defence attorneys and the two white witnesses for the boys had to be guarded by soldiers. After the first two days in court the southerners took to openly insulting the defence lawyers, and the state prosecutor, Knight, could not control his rage and shook his first at Heywood Patterson, shouting " that black thing over there." The Negroes, who throughout the case showed a determined and militant spirit despite all kinds of intimidation and who attended in large numbers, and the two coloured reporters for the Negro press, were of course put in a pen apart from the whites. The atmosphere was volcanic with hatred. Propaganda was made that " Jew money from the north " was defending Negroes ; the house of a Negro witness in the next boy's trial was burned down, a white worker beaten for giving facts about the court proceedings to the Negro inhabitants . . . Later a gang broke into the house of one of the counsels for the defence and tried to destroy the legal records.