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Contested Representations of the Scottsboro Trials Sarah Lawrence College DigitalCommons@SarahLawrence Women's History Theses Women’s History Graduate Program 5-2016 Belle Versus or Tramp Versus Child?: Contested Representations of the Scottsboro Trials Henry Guston Kemp Broege Sarah Lawrence College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.slc.edu/womenshistory_etd Part of the Women's History Commons Recommended Citation Broege, Henry Guston Kemp, "Belle Versus or Tramp Versus Child?: Contested Representations of the Scottsboro Trials" (2016). Women's History Theses. 11. https://digitalcommons.slc.edu/womenshistory_etd/11 This Thesis - Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Women’s History Graduate Program at DigitalCommons@SarahLawrence. It has been accepted for inclusion in Women's History Theses by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@SarahLawrence. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 1 Belle Versus Beast or Tramp Versus Child?: Contested Representations of the Scottsboro Trials Henry Guston Kemp Broege Submitted in partial completion of the Master of Arts Degree at Sarah Lawrence College, May 2016 2 In June of 2015, while I was in Montgomery doing research for my master’s thesis, an act of terrorism was carried out by Dylann Roof, a twenty­one­year­old White supremacist man, who entered the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina and shot to death nine Black churchgoers during their service.1 When asked about his motives, Roof said, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”2 Even though Roof was born in 1994, his reason for committing the crime was no different from that of southern White lynch mobs for killing Black men in the late nineteenth century.3 Similarly, in January of 2016, the Governor of Maine, Paul LePage, in attributing the heroin epidemic in the state to Black men from New York and Connecticut, said, “Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave, which is a real sad thing because then we have another issue that we've got to deal with down the road. We're going to make them very severe penalties.”4 This was a Reconstruction­era allusion to a racially pure and defenseless White woman, complemented by another dangerous social construct: Black rapists, “beasts unfit to be called human.”5 White men relied on the Black rapist stereotype to reinforce their role as patriarchs, by scaring White women into abiding by their rules for protection. No matter what class, White women in the South were deemed racially pure, requiring the protection of White men.6 Over a century later, Roof’s manifesto, and LePage’s commentary on Maine’s 1 Nick Corasaniti and Richard Perez­Pena, and Lizette Alvarez, "Church Massacre Suspect Held as Charleston ​ Grieves," New York Times, June 18, 2015, sec. U.S. ​ ​ 2 Lisa Wade, "How ‘Benevolent Sexism’ Drove Dylann Roof’s Racist Massacre," Washington Post, June 21, 2015, ​ ​ sec. PostEverything. 3 Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 185. ​ ​ ​ 4 Mollie Reilly, “Paul LePage Makes Racist Claim About Drug Dealers Named D­Money Getting White Girls Pregnant,” Huffington Post, January 7, 2016, sec. Huffpost Politics. ​ ​ 5 Peter Piper, “Revolting In Last Degree In Story Of Girls,” Huntsville Daily Times, March 26, 1931. ​ ​ 6 Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth­Century South (New Haven, CT: Yale ​ ​ ​ University Press, 1997), 201. 3 heroin problem articulate fears of this predatory Black male archetype as a contemporary threat.7 However, the actual threat that southern White men confronted during Reconstruction was the economic and political agency that Black men had gained from emancipation, which could establish a new Black masculinity that was more similar to White masculinity than during slavery. It was a crisis of gender, race, and power in the making. Lynching, often purported to be a response to a Black man’s sexual misconduct, became a tool to maintain traditional racial and gender social order in the South.8 During the 1920s, as a result of publications by Ida B. Wells­Barnett,9 the organizing of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation,10 and lobbying by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP),11 lynching rates declined,12 as did the evocation of the Black rapist myth.13 Still, fears of Black sexuality persisted, and played a major role in the most prominent rape case of the twentieth century,14 7 “Segregation was not a bad thing. It was a defensive measure. Segregation did not exist to hold back negroes. It ​ existed to protect us from them. And I mean that in multiple ways. Not only did it protect us from having to interact with them, and from being physically harmed by them, but it protected us from being brought down to their level. Integration has done nothing but bring Whites down to level of brute animals.”; "Here’s What Appears to Be Dylann Roof's Racist Manifesto," Mother Jones, June 20, 2015, sec. Politics. ​ ​ 8 James W. Messerschmidt, "‘We Must Protect Our Women’: On Whiteness, Masculinities, and Lynching," In Race, ​ Gender, and Punishment: From Colonialism to the War on Terror, ed. Mary Bosworth and Jeanne Flavin (New ​ Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 83. The Southern White man was the primary decision maker, “the ultimate source of secular authority,” and was to be obeyed by “women, children, and slaves.” He was well educated, “firm, commanding, and the perfect patriarch.” He had “virility and mastery of his environment,” and was commonly addressed as “Lord” and “Master”; Anne F. Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics 1830­1930 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970), 14. 9 Ida B. Wells­Barnett, On Lynchings, Dover Books on African­Americans (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, ​ ​ ​ 2014). 10 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against ​ ​ Lynching (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 160. ​ 11 Estelle B. Freedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Cambridge, MA: ​ ​ ​ Harvard University Press, 2013), 243. 12 Average annual lynchings reported in the 1890s numbered 187.5, but for the 1920s, the figure was 16.8; Michael ​ ​ ​ Klarman, “Scottsboro,” Marquette Law Review 93, no. 2 (2009): 381. ​ ​ 13 The Black rapist myth was succeeded in the 1920s by the neo­Sambo myth. Like the Sambo that preceded the ​ Black rapist, the neo­Sambo was “docile, subordinate, pliable, conforming, and loyal,” but the neo­Sambo could also be an independent adult; Joel Williamson, A Rage for Order: Black/White Relations in the American South ​ Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 236. ​ 14 Freedman, Redefining Rape, 253. ​ ​ ​ 4 which began when Black male teenagers and young White women were discovered hoboing on the same train. The year was 1931. The Great Depression was well underway. Unemployment was rising, and young people were leaving their homes in search of work. Many of them hoboed, riding trains to look for jobs. This was especially true in Alabama, one of the southern states hit hardest by the Great Depression.15 On March 25th of that year, on a Southern Railway freight train traveling from Chattanooga to Memphis, there were over a dozen young people hoboing, including several Black teenage boys, two young White women, and several White teenage boys, all scattered throughout the train. In response to a dispute with the White teenagers on the train, a young Black man named Haywood Patterson called for help from some of the other Black teenagers to force the White boys off of the train.16 Once off the train, the White teenagers complained to the stationmaster in Stevenson that they had been assaulted by “Negroes.” A phone call was made by the Jackson County Sheriff, M.L. Wann, to a deputy in Paint Rock, Alabama, who was ordered to, “capture every negro on the train,” when it was stopped.17 Nine Black teenagers were then rounded up, tied with a plow line, and sent to the jail in Scottsboro.18 The charges were “Assault and attempt to murder.” Once the teenagers were in jail, they received another charge, which took priority over the first one: rape. The two White women on the train, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, came to the jail. Price pointed to the Black teenagers, whom the pair claimed had raped them. The nine 15 Scottsboro: An American Tragedy, directed by Daniel Anker and Barak Goodman (Social Media Productions, ​ ​ PBS Home Video, and WGBH, 2001) DVD (Cowboy Pictures, 2001). 16 James Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 4. ​ ​ ​ 17 James R. Acker, Scottsboro and Its Legacy: The Cases that Challenged American Legal and ​ ​ Social Justice (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2008), 2. ​ 18 Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro, 4. ​ ​ ​ 5 male teenagers were nineteen­year­old Charlie Weems, eighteen­year­old Clarence Norris, nineteen­year­old Andy Wright, twelve­year­old Roy Wright, eighteen­year­old Haywood Patterson, thirteen­year­old Eugene Williams, seventeen­year­old Willie Roberson, sixteen­year­old Ozie Powell, and seventeen­year­old Olen Montgomery.19 In stark contrast to these new accusations, the teenagers contended that they had not seen the two women before the train had stopped in Paint Rock.20 Bates and Price had an ulterior motive for coming forward; their accusation would nullify the charges they could potentially have received for hoboing.21 Since the nine teenagers were Black, and Price and Bates were both White, eight of the nine teenagers were swiftly convicted of rape and sentenced to death. Roy Wright was spared the death penalty because he was only thirteen years old.22 When word got out about the arrests of the nine Black teenagers,23 the International Labor Defense (ILD), a legal defense group that was the American branch of International Red Aid, from the Communist International (Comintern), reached out to the families of the arrested teenagers and offered legal defense.24 Meanwhile, the Black Communist B.
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