At Decatur (Cont'd)

"The soldiers and the Sheriff's men are expected to defend these prisoners with their lives. Any man who defies them may expect to forfeit his life. I have no tolerance for mob spirit."

Crosses had been burned at nearby Scottsboro and Huntsville, hotheads had met in a room near the courthouse the night before; the scrubby little town of Decatur, Ala. was darkly restless when Judge James E. Horton thus warned its citizens one morning last week. He had sent the jury from his courtroom during his speech. Now he called them back and proceeded with the sensationalized trial of bullet-headed Haywood Patterson, first of seven young Scottsboro blacks accused of raping two white girls, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, in a freight gondola two years ago (TIME, April 10 et ante).

Twice-married, sullen Victoria Price was star witness for the State. It was up to Defense Counsel Samuel S. Leibowitz of Manhattan, engaged by the International Labor Defense but no Red, to break down her testimony. He was not allowed to introduce evidence that she had been convicted of bootlegging, vagrancy, adultery. The night before the alleged gondola rape, testimony of one of Counsel Leibowitz's Negro witnesses indicated, she had lain in a Chattanooga hobo camp.

Mrs. Price made a truculent witness for the defense. There was much that she "disremembered." She did not know how old she was. "I ain't that educated that I can figure it out." Her prime taunt was to challenge the defense to produce her missing friend, Ruby Bates, and "ask her about it."

Surprise. After the State had rested. Counsel Leibowitz announced he would call as a witness one Lester Carter. Surprised indeed was the prosecution at Witness Carter's appearance. He swore that Victoria Price had taken Ruby Bates to visit him when he was working in a chain gang near Huntsville. He said that after he was released, he took the two girls to Chattanooga. They were bumming their way back to Huntsville when the fight with the Negro hoboes developed. The girls, he said, were not molested.

Shock. No sooner had Witness Carter stepped off the stand than the Defense announced: "We will call Ruby Bates." Now the prosecution table buzzed with excitement. Judge Norton stepped down off his bench, walked to the rail enclosure as the young woman, clad in new "store clothes" and escorted by an elderly social worker, shuffled through the courtroom door. Victoria Price panted angrily.

Ruby Bates proceeded to repudiate her testimony at the Negroes' 1931 trial. She said: "I told it just like Victoria did because she said we might have to stay in jail if we did not frame up a story after crossing a state line with men."

The witness then told a strange story of her movements since she vanished Feb. 28 from her Huntsville home. She said she had gone to New York to see Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, in whose Rockefeller-built Riverside Church choir two Negroes sing. In New York, Preacher Fosdick said: "She came alone and of her own free will. I, as a clergyman, advised her to tell the truth. She promised me that she would go back to the second trial and do so."

Ruby Bates said she had gone back to Birmingham "all by myself" on a bus, had called at an Episcopal minister's home, had been delivered to Counsel Joseph Brodsky of the International Labor Defense. But in most spectators' minds was the conviction that Miss Bates had been advised and subsidized by the Defense just as they believed Victoria Price had been taken care of by the prosecution.

Jew Money! Race hatred was now fanned into a white blaze. Cried Attorney General Thomas E. Knight. "Ruby Bates sold out for a grey hat and a grey coat!'

Prosecutor Wade Wright, celebrated "all-day singer" in his community, savagely shouted at the jury: "Show them that Alabama justice cannot be bought and sold with Jew money from New York! That man Carter is a new kind of man to me. If he had been with Brodsky another two weeks he would have been down here with a pack on his back a-trying to sell you goods. Are you going to countenance that sort of thing?"

Counsel Leibowitz jumped to his feet, demanded a mistrial. He denied that he was "getting any fee or a penny of expenses" for his part in the case. "When the hour of our country's need came, there was no question of Jew or Gentile, black or white," he declaimed. "All, all together braved the smoke and flame of Flanders Fields."

Verdict. Next day, reminding the jury that "wrong dies and truth forever lasts," Judge Horton charged the twelve white men to judge the case without "petty prejudices."

On Palm Sunday morning, 22 hours after they had retired, the Decatur jurors summoned Judge Horton to hear their verdict. Waiting for the Judge to arrive. Negro Patterson thought it was a good sign when he heard the jury laughing in its room. Patterson was wrong. Verdict: "We find the defendant guilty as charged and fix the punishment as death in the electric chair."

Southerners could not see how the jury could have decided otherwise. How could a man continue to live in a small southern town if everyone who passed him on the street knew that he was one of twelve who set at liberty a blackamoor who surely had fought whites, possibly had molested a white woman?

Judge Horton thanked the jury. Counsel Leibowitz thanked Judge Horton, told him he was "taking back to New York a picture of one of the finest jurists I have ever met." Then Counsel Leibowitz turned to the Press, saying: "Will we appeal this case? Most assuredly. Up to the highest court of our land that once before hurled this mess back into the laps of the bigots, and we'll continue to fight until Hell freezes over!"

In Manhattan a crowd of 3,000 cheering Negroes stormed Penn Station to greet Lawyer Leibowitz, bore him on shoulders to his taxicab. Then they marched uptown in a riotous impromptu protest parade, fought rough-&-tumble with police a half-dozen times.

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