Scottsboro case: trial and appeals (1 gen 1931 anni – 1 gen 1937 anni)

Descrizione:

In 1939, writer John La Touche and musician Earl Robinson composed “Ballad for Americans,” a patriotic song with lyrics calling for the solidarity of “everybody who’s nobody … Irish, Negro, Jewish, Italian, French, and English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Polish, Scotch, Hungarian, Litvak, Swedish, Finnish, Canadian, Greek, and Turk, and Czech and double Czech American.” The ballad became a hit, capturing the democratic aspirations awakened by the New Deal. Millions of ordinary people — “Engineer, musician, street cleaner, carpenter, teacher … How about a farmer?” went the song — took inspiration from New Deal reforms and worked toward a more egalitarian national idea.

The New Deal opened fresh possibilities for realizing the more inclusive democratic society envisioned in La Touche and Robinson’s song. Many New Deal initiatives touched the lives of, and sometimes empowered, groups long relegated to second-class status in American life, such as labor unions, African Americans, and Native Americans. Not every group benefitted equally, but a notable feature of the New Deal was its broad social inclusiveness.

Across the nation, but especially in the South, African Americans faced harsh social, economic, and political discrimination. Though Roosevelt’s reforms did not fundamentally change this reality, black Americans received significant benefits from New Deal relief programs and believed that the White House cared about their plight, which caused a momentous shift in their political allegiance. Since the Civil War, black voters had staunchly supported the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, who was known as the Great Emancipator. Even in the depression year of 1932, they overwhelmingly supported Republican candidates. But in 1936, as part of the tidal wave of national support for FDR, northern African Americans gave Roosevelt 71 percent of their votes and have remained solidly Democratic ever since.

African Americans supported the New Deal partly because the Roosevelt administration appointed a number of black people to federal office, and an informal “black cabinet” of prominent black intellectuals advised New Deal agencies. Among the most important appointees was Mary McLeod Bethune, who filled the post of director of Negro Affairs in the National Youth Administration (NYA), an agency within the WPA focused on education and employment among Americans aged 16 to 25. Born in 1875 in South Carolina to former slaves, Bethune founded Bethune-Cookman College and served during the 1920s as president of the National Association of Colored Women. She joined the New Deal in 1936, confiding to a friend that she “believed in the democratic and humane program” of FDR. She saw her prominent role as an important symbolic step toward racial equality — Americans, she observed, had to become “accustomed to seeing Negroes in high places.” With access to the White House and a broad mandate within the administration, Bethune pushed for New Deal programs to help African Americans.

The agitation of Bethune and other members of the black cabinet proved meaningful. African Americans constituted 10 percent of the country’s population but held 18 percent of WPA jobs. The Resettlement Administration, established in 1935 to help small farmers and tenants buy land, actively protected the rights of black tenant farmers. However, the New Deal’s inclusion of African Americans could not undo centuries of racial subordination, nor could it temper the disproportionate power of segregationist southern whites within the Democratic Party.

Roosevelt and New Deal Democrats did not go further in support of black rights, owing to their own racial conservatism and their reliance on white southern Democrats in Congress — including powerful southern senators, many of whom held influential congressional committee posts. Most New Deal programs reflected prevailing racial attitudes. Civilian Conservation Corps camps segregated African Americans, and most NRA rules did not protect black workers from discrimination. Both the Social Security Act and the Wagner Act explicitly excluded the domestic and agricultural jobs held by most African Americans at the time. Roosevelt also refused to support legislation making lynching a federal crime, ignoring one of the most pressing black political demands. Between 1882 and 1930, more than 2,500 African Americans were lynched by white mobs; one man, woman, or child was murdered every week for fifty years. Those responsible often escaped punishment due to indifferent local and state law enforcement. Despite pleas from black leaders, and from Mrs. Roosevelt herself, FDR feared that southern white Democrats would block his other reforms in retaliation if he supported a federal antilynching law.


he Agricultural Adjustment Act aimed to boost the agricultural commodity process by subsidizing farmers to cut production. In the South, the AAA wound up hurting rather than helping the poorest African Americans, because many white landowners collected government payments but refused to distribute payments to tenants. Such practices forced an estimated 200,000 black families off the land. Some black farmers tried to protect themselves by joining the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), an organization notable for its racial integration. “The same chain that holds you holds my people, too,” an elderly black farmer from Arkansas reminded his white neighbors. But landowners had such economic power and such support from local sheriffs that the STFU could do little.

The denial of justice for African Americans in the South attracted increasing attention nationwide. In an infamous 1931 case in Alabama, nine young black men were accused of rape by two white women hitching a ride on a freight train. The women’s stories contained many inconsistencies, but within weeks a white jury in the town of Scottsboro convicted all nine defendants; eight received the death sentence. After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the sentences because the defendants had been denied adequate legal counsel, five of the men were again convicted and sentenced to long prison terms. Across the country, the Scottsboro Boys, as they were known, inspired solidarity within African American communities. Among whites, the Communist Party took the lead in publicizing the case — and was one of the only white organizations to do so — helping to support the Scottsboro Defense Committee, which raised money for legal efforts on the defendants’ behalf.

The New Deal’s democratic promise inspired a generation of African American leaders, but that promise was largely unfulfilled for black Americans. From the outset, New Dealers wrestled with deeply entrenched racial politics. Many Democrats in the North and West — centers of New Deal liberalism — increasingly opposed racial discrimination. But Roosevelt and the party as a whole depended heavily on white voters in the South, who insisted on segregation and white supremacy. This meant that the nation’s most liberal political forces and some of its most conservative political forces jostled side by side in the same political party. Significant progress against widespread racial injustice would not come for another generation.

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