In April 1931, Herbert Hoover was just back from his first and last visit as President to the Virgin Islands ("a poorhouse" to him). Same month, eight young Negroes were sentenced to death at Scottsboro. Ala. for raping two white female hoboes in a Southern Ry. freight gondola (TIME, June 22, 1931).
In November 1932, the North was being treated to an orgy of self-righteousness by a semi-autobiographical film called / Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang. Same month, the U. S. Supreme Court set aside the Scottsboro verdicts on the ground that the defendants had not been provided with adequate counsel.
In April 1933, the U. S. S. Akron was lost off the New Jersey coast. Same month, this time in Decatur, Ala., bullet-headed Haywood Patterson, leader of the "Scottsboro Boys," was found guilty of rape by a jury that fixed the death penalty. Scrupulous Judge James E. Horton set aside the verdict as unwarranted by the evidence, thereby signed his own political death warrant (TIME, April 17, 1933).
In December 1933, millions of citizens were sampling Repeal liquor for the first time. Same month, for the third time, at Decatur Negro Patterson heard himself condemned to death by a jury of twelve white men (TIME, Dec. n, 1933).
In April 1935, Congress appropriated four billion dollars for work relief, and the word "boondoggling'' rushed headlong into the U. S. vocabulary. Same month, the U. S. Supreme Court again overruled the Alabama courts on the Scottsboro case, finding that since Negroes had been "systematically excluded'' from the jury rolls, the defendants had been deprived of their rights under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. Governor Bibb Graves firmly declared: ''Alabama is going to observe the supreme law of America!"
By last week, when the Scottsboro affair was ending its fifth year and beginning its fourth trial scene, the accused Negroes had long since ceased to be a handful of friendless vagrants. Instead they had become black symbols of economic bitterness, race prejudice, sectional hatred and political conflict. To the Communist Party of the U. S., which had rushed to the Negroes' side with cash & counsel, the Scottsboro Boys were martyrs to Southern injustice and intolerance. To Southerners, the defendants were a gang of "bad niggers" whose crime was being brazenly exploited by malicious Reds, Jews and Yankees. Responsible Southern sentiment indicated, however, that a fair trial might finally be guaranteed if the defense would abandon its obvious air of partisanship. Apparently in response to this feeling, shortly before the trial the Reds involved in the defense had retreated rather clumsily behind a committee of intersectional liberals. To do the actual pleading, an Alabama lawyer had been hired. But Samuel Leibowitz of New York City. who had been through the second and third trials, remained as No. 1 counsel for the defense. Similarly, the State's representatives in court were oldtimers too, the judge and prosecutor being the same who had caused Trial No. 3 to be characterized by the U. S. Supreme Court as a fine exhibition of Jim Crow justice.