This article is Part II of a four-part series on the Scottsboro Boys. In 1931, during the Great Depression, nine young Black men were falsely accused of raping two white women on a freight train in Scottsboro, Alabama.  However, the U.S. Communist Party (CP) initiated and led a world-wide struggle involving millions of people fighting to prevent their execution and to free the “Scottsboro boys.  Part II coincides with the 160th anniversay of Juneteenth—the day enslaved Black workers in Texas finally learned they were “free”, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. The racist travesty of the Scottsboro case is part of a long, unbroken chain of racist violence, forged during the 1600s at the transatlantic slave trade, and is inseparable from the capitalist system itself.

Parts III and IV will help us get ready for our annual summer project. This year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Boston’s 1975 Summer Project. That summer, the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) played a pivotal role in the struggle against local Nazis and their racist political allies from attacking young Black youth who were being bussed in effort to desegregate, all-white schools in Boston. The movement mobilized working-class youth and community members in an unforgettable, militant struggle against gutter racist capitalism and state-sanctioned violence. 

”This series of articles will analyze the role of the two major defense strategies in this case, the International Labor Defense (ILD), the legal arm of Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and the NAACP. We will study the different strategies as they relate to the questions of mass protest, institutional racism, the fight for legal reforms, and the use of the courtroom to raise the level of political consciousness and struggle.

Dividing Black and white workers

Political questions were extremely important throughout the entire course of the trials. The extreme economic deprivation, the minimal level of subsistence for tens of thousands of Black and white farmers and sharecroppers at this time had resulted in a growing radical anti-hunger movement in the south symbolized by a communist-led hunger march in Atlanta in 1930. 

From the 1600s, when white indentured servants were told they were “better” than the newly created Black slaves, through the time of the Black Codes, the Ku Klux Klan, and the racist Post-Reconstruction governments, maintaining differentials in living standards as well as civil and political liberties between Blacks and whites was crucial in convincing white workers and farmers that the struggle for their common good lay in unity with “their own race” instead of their own class. 

The Central Committee of the Communist Party U.S.A. adopted this theory in their analysis of the Scottsboro case: The “parasite landlord and capitalist classes of the South” concocted the trial and sentence, they said, because they saw a movement among Black people and whites in backward Southern communities which threatened their ''super-exploitation.'' By enlisting the white workers in their “beastly lynching crimes,” Southern capitalists could effectively split the working classes of the region.

The “trial” then, was political -- little more than window dressing for legalized murder. There was substantial testimony to indicate the two white female complainants had crossed state lines to engage in sexual intercourse, a violation of the Mann Act. Their position when they were taken into custody was extremely vulnerable, and they could easily have been forced into bringing the charge. 

Finally, the state insisted on continuing the prosecution, even when one of the trial judges was informed by a doctor who had examined the women that it was physically impossible that they had been raped. 

ILD begins defense strategy 

The International Labor Defense (legal arm of the Communist Party) accepted the fact that the state had made the case a political trial. This point of view shaped the entire strategy employed by the ILD from 1931 through 1935. This strategy was grounded on three fundamental principles: 

• the absolute commitment of the defense committee to the total innocence and necessity of total freedom for the defendants; 
• the assertion that only primary reliance on mass international protest, through meetings, demonstrations, petitions, telegrams, fund-raising, forums, press releases, etc. could eventually secure the freedom of the defendants; 
• using every single legal avenue available within the court to argue for the defendants' freedom.  The ILD was undoubtedly influenced in adopting this strategy by its political outlook. 

The ILD further argued that only fervent efforts directed at building a mass movement against the convictions would finally force release of the defendants. Since the trial was a vicious political attempt by the Southern ruling class to split Black from white workers, the ILD said, then it followed that only the mass unity and struggle of Black and white against the system which caused the racist trial to happen could win the freedom of the Scottsboro boys.

Working in bosses’ court vs with working class

The contradiction that troubled the ILD the most was that between mass protest and legal reform (short of the defendants' freedom). If large numbers of people accepted the idea that the courts could administer justice, mass protest would be limited. During this period, the ILD saw the contradiction between using the best lawyers and all legal techniques versus fostering “democratic and legalist illusions among the masses”  as the most fundamentally dangerous part of the defense.

The question of winning legal reforms did not arise until after the initial trial in 1931. On appeal to the Alabama and U.S. Supreme Courts, the questions of right to counsel, and denial of fair trial through exclusion of Black jurors were raised and became a much more central part of the ILD strategy. ILD publicity at first placed little emphasis on this part of the strategy because they feared this would cause workers to place faith in the courts and neglect the class struggle.

No alliances with reformist groups

Outside the courtroom, the ILD repudiated alliance with any of the leadership of the various “leftist” and civil rights groups, including the Socialist Party, the Socialist Labor Party, the NAACP, the American Workers Party, the American Federation of Labor  and other union leaders, major church leaders or the capitalist press. The ILD argued that the leadership of these groups were reformist, and would inevitably “sell out”and lead any struggle into reliance on the capitalist system and its laws. 

Instead, the emphasis was on a “united front from below,” which would hopefully involve huge numbers of rank-and-file members of these groups in a defense committee under the leadership of the ILD. These rank-and-file members would not necessarily agree with the ILD program. But by tireless work and linking of the Scottsboro case to local demands and struggles (for jobs, food, etc.), ILD members would bring more and more people into the ILD, and eventually force the freedom of the defendants through continued demonstrations, rallies, and mass actions.

The first trial ended in death sentences for all but the youngest of the Scottsboro boys. The ILD objective then became to get the case moved to a court in Birmingham, an industrial city with white and Black workers. The ILD was unable to overcome the tremendous racism and antagonism among the population directed against the defendants and their lawyers. The change of venue was granted, but to Decatur, a town fifty miles west of Scottsboro and “a center of Klan strength in ... the 1920's” instead of Birmingham. 

The denial of change of venue to Birmingham made the ILD courtroom strategy much more difficult. Some reliance would have to be placed on appeal proceedings around the issues of exclusion of Black jurors and fairness of the trial. 

The ILD retained Samuel Leibowitz, a New York Democrat. Although Leibowitz was a famous trial lawyer, he was an anti-communist and close to the Democratic Party, the party of Southern segregation. Before long he would attack the CP. 

According to one source, “Leibowitz also demanded from Patterson (of the ILD) a tacit agreement that political activities would be soft-pedaled until after the trial.” In reality, the period from March 1933 to July 1933 was one of tremendous numbers of mass protests.

The defense opened the trial by challenging both the grand and petit juries on the ground that qualified Blacks were available, and that exclusion violated the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment. 

The ILD decided that the benefits gained from attacking the jury system and raising the whole question in a mass way of Black exclusion from the jury outweighed any additional antagonism generated within the all-white jury. The ILD also hoped to link up the exclusion of Black people from juries and voting to the same restrictions placed on poor whites such as requirement of property ownership and the poll tax. 

After the initial motions were denied, the ILD courtroom battle was largely confined to vigorous cross-examination of state witnesses through an effort to show the physical impossibility of many of their assertions, combined with calling several defense witnesses who contradicted the prosecution, including one of the former complainants, Ruby Bates.

The prosecution appealed to racism. Attorney General Knight constantly insulted Black witnesses. He ended with this plea to the jury: ''Show them that Alabama justice cannot be bought and sold with Jew money from New York.” 

One of the chief reasons for this approach was the political beliefs of Leibowitz. After the first trial was over, he made a statement to the press indiscriminately condemning Southern whites as “lantern-jawed creatures ... whose eyes pop out like frogs ... whose chins drip tobacco juice, bewhiskered and filthy.”  His general attitude, like that of the NAACP, was that poor whites were hardened racists and only the civilized (rich) whites could be relied on for justice. 

This was entirely opposed to the ILD philosophy that the Southern ruling class was responsible for and benefited from deep divisions among the Southern poor and that only Black and white unity could gain the ends the poor desired.