Word: scottsboro
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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They Shall Not Die (by John Wexley; produced by the Theatre Guild). Playwright Wexley bases his works (The Last Mile, Steel) on Causes. They Shall Not Die is an angry review of the Scottsboro Case. On the premise that the rape charge against the nine young blackamoors was a frame-up, the play doggedly follows the pattern of the news from the alleged attack aboard a freight train through the first trial to the Supreme Court and on to the second trial. In fact a Manhattan lawyer named Samuel Leibowitz desperately defended the Negroes against a death penalty...
...Japan, Bernard Baruch; behind them the "Living Death" and other photographic War horrors taken whole from The Horror of It (TIME, March 21, 1932). The other panel shows a row of blue-clad factory girls apparently chained to a stamping machine, nine young Negroes to represent the seven "Scottsboro boys,'' Tom Mooney in jail, and Sacco & Vanzetti in electrode masks at the moment of their execution...
Thus for the third time in three years did an Alabama jury last week decide the fate of 20-year-old Negro Heywood Patterson. Accused with eight other Negroes of raping two white girls in a freight car near Scottsboro, he had twice been saved from the electric chair by judicial appeal. The first conviction was set aside by the U. S. Supreme Court last year and a new trial ordered (TIME, Nov. 14, 1932). The second was voided by the judge at the second trial who claimed the verdict was unwarranted by the evidence. This time at Decatur Patterson...
Judge Callahan's announced intention was to "debunk" the Scottsboro case. At the first two trials there had been noise and bustle, the clicking of typewriters, he glare of camera flashlights. Last week Judge Callahan excluded all photographers. All was quiet as a squat, hard-faced blonde in a blue chiffon dress and a peaked black hat climbed to the witness stand, chewing snuff. Victoria Price, twice-married mill-hand, onetime vagrant, told in less than ten minutes and in language so foul that newshawks could not print it, the story of her alleged rape. Then she pointed...
...although wide publicity seems not to have materially benefitted the Scottsboro defendants, it has at least served to emphasize the need for centralization, of criminal procedure in America. The petty jurisdiction of local medieval bailiwicks lends itself all too easily to intimidation either by organized thugs or by the blind fury of an ignorant mob. Only by the introduction of a strong system of federal courts, now made practical by modern avenues of communication, will local prejudice eventually be transcended and uniform justice meted...