Language and Authenticity...The Scottsboro Boys Defense

These excerpts from letters evidently written by Olen Montgomery and Roy Wright stand in noticeable contrast to the appeal issued in the name of the Scottsboro defendants in the May 1932 issue of The Negro Worker: 31
From the death cell here in Kilby Prison, eight of us Scottsboro boys is writing this to you. We have been sentenced to die for something we ain't never done. Us poor boys been sentenced to burn up on the electric chair for the reason we is workers—and the color of our skin is black. We like any one of you workers is none of us older than 20. Two of us is 14 and one is 13 years old . . . What we guilty of? Nothing but being out of a job. Nothing but looking for work. Our kinfolk was starving for food. we wanted to help them out. So we hopped a freight—just like any one of you workers might a done—to go down to Mobile to hunt work. We was taken off the train by a mob and framed up on rape charges . . . Only ones helped us down here been the International Labor Defense and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights. We don't put no faith in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. They give some of us boys eats to go against the other boys who talked for the I.L.D. But we wouldn't split. Nohow. We know our friends and our enemies. Working class boys, we asks you to save us from being burnt on the electric chair. We's only poor working class boys whose skin is black. We shouldn't die for that. We hear about working people holding meetings for us all over the world. We asks for more big meetings. It'll take a lot of big meetings to help the I.L.D. and the L.S.N.R. to save us from the bossman down here. Help us boys. We ain't done nothing wrong. We are only workers like you are. Only our skin is black.61
32
The Scottsboro Boys were illiterate or barely literate. Ozie Powell had three months of schooling. Clarence Norris completed the second grade, Heywood Patterson the third, Olen Montgomery and Charlie Weems the fifth, and Andy Wright the sixth.62 Any attempt to render their voices and their outlook required considerable tactical and rhetorical sensitivity. The various voices within which the defendants, and subsequently, their mothers, spoke—or were spoken for—reflected attempts to convey black vernacular speech through written dialect, some, to be sure, more accurate and authentic-sounding than others. These attempts to render black "authenticity" go to the heart of the strategic and rhetorical decisions that shaped the Scottsboro campaign. They were highly charged, carrying with them the possibilities of the international, multilingual replication of deeply entrenched racial stereotypes derived from the legacy of minstrelsy in American culture.63 To appropriate Scottsboro was to lurch into the mainstream of American southern experience and to link the defendants' plight to the economic hardships and racial discontent of northern black communities. It was to join the outcry against lynching and racial injustice with the sentiments of Jews and Gentiles, liberals and radicals, domestics and dockworkers, meatpackers and lawyers. It was, above all, to try to find a language that would forge solidarity among these various audiences. Making the case comprehensible to a global audience meant making the plight of the defendants a part of the vocabulary of social injustice and police terror in a multiplicity of accents and relying on the existing reputation of the South abroad.64 33
There was considerable initial behind-the-scenes discussion in the CPUSA about the terms within which the campaign would be presented, some of it shaped by concern about the racial and gender dynamics of the legal charges against the Scottsboro defendants. One week after the first trials, Clarence Hathaway, on behalf of the Politburo, wired a number of slogans to Tom Johnson, who opposed their call to "DEMAND NEW TRIAL BEFORE JURY COMPOSED OF WORKERS AT LEAST HALF TO BE NEGROES," arguing that this was a meaningless plea in Tennessee; instead, he proposed the slogan "DEMAND A NEW TRIAL BEFORE A NEGRO JURY."65 As for the "10,000 [whites] who shouted for blood," Johnson observed, "These were not bosses, they were all misled, half-starved white mountaineers and croppers." The bosses and landlords were not concerned about the virtue of white women; the party should want to stress the long hours inflicted on white and black women in the textile mills while "croppers and their families are left to starve."66 But two weeks after their conviction, it was the defendants who were cast as victimized black workers: "They are typical honest and innocent hardworking lads of tender age and absolutely not of the hardened sort that could possibly be conceived to have committed the crime of violent attack upon women . . . These boys . . . are too simple and direct, as well as too young to be able to dissimulate under the pressure of a case of this kind."67 34
The allusions to gender and the sexual in the rhetoric of the campaign, in what was, after all, a rape trial, betray the preoccupations of party strategists. They reveal Communist inexperience, naïveté, discomfort, and ambivalence about interracial mixing. Typically, a district party leader responded sharply to a press photo in which a white female comrade was portrayed standing with a black comrade, referring to the "cheap sex publicity on the part of the Negro comrade. Such a picture appearing in the capitalist newspapers will drive away millions of American workers from the Party."68 During the Gastonia strike, bosses or their agents distributed an anti–Communist Party leaflet that asked, "would you want your sister to marry a Negro?"69 There was extensive discussion about not replying to the leaflet, as this might compromise the party in relationship to its white southern worker constituency. On the surface, a national and increasing global awareness of lynching created space for a critique of the prevailing race and gender coding in American culture, particularly with regard to anxieties about interracial sex. As Roger N. Baldwin of the Scottsboro Defense Committee would put it in 1937: "whatever the evidence, no Negro can be acquitted when a white woman, even of the lowest character, accuses him . . . [S]o deep-rooted is southern prejudice, in favor of the word of any white woman, whatever her character, that no defense can overcome it."70 In practice, though, the rhetoric adopted for the Scottsboro campaign tacitly accepted that attacking white womanhood was bad; it simply argued that the Scottsboro Boys "did not do it." At best, it made white women complicitous in the oppression of black men,71 and this judgment was eased by the identification of Ruby Bates and Victoria Price as prostitutes; if any white women were worth defending, these two were certainly not among them: "Two notorious prostitutes were the only witnesses against them, but the slave driving landlords of the South forced through the death sentence to terrorize the Negro masses into accepting still lower wages and worse conditions."72 The option of defending Ruby Bates and Victoria Price as unemployed textile workers was there from the outset and not taken up, until Bates recanted her testimony in January 1933, whereupon she was finally embraced as a "worker."