Victoria price and ruby bates traits
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Victoria's story continued that while the freight was moving rapidly between Stevenson and Paint Rock, a distance of approximately 38 miles, the Negroes having driven the seven white boys from the train, attacked the two girls. Victoria Price testified that six raped her and six, Ruby Bates. Three of the ones who attacked Ruby got off before the train stopped at Paint Rock, Victoria said. She alleged that Charlie Weems was the leader and carried a pistol, but that Clarence Norris was the first one to attack her. He was followed by four others who took turns holding, she claimed, and then the leader, Weems, as the last one, was in the process of raping her when the train stopped at Paint Rock and the Negroes were captured by the posse who had been notified by telegraph from Stevenson that the Negroes were on the train.
A Lynching Spirit
Officials and residents of Scottsboro maintained that the crowd was peaceful and showed no evidence of lynching spirit. Mrs. Ben Davis, local reporter for the Chattanooga Times, wrote that the crowd was "curious not furious" and was so pleased with her phrase that she continued to repeat it innumerable times when interviewed. Judge Hawkins, Dr.
Bridges, Hamlin Caldwell, the court stenographer; Sheriff Wann and many others were emphatic in their statements that the crowd had poured into Scottsboro in the spirit of going to a circus and wanted to see the show, but were without malicious intent toward the defendants.
Document 18: "Ruby Bates Tells Story," New York Times, 6 May 1933, p.
What was their sentence? The notoriety of the Scottsboro boys singled them out in Kilby Prison for continual torment by guards; as their situation grew more hopeless, they turned on each other as they awaited their postponed trials. It was not until __1946_____ (insert year in blank) that Alabama paroled all the defendants except __Haywood Patterson_____.
The atmosphere was riotous and the National Guard had to come in to control the crowd. More specifically, how did the women avoid arrest?
Yet here was Ruby saying earnestly, as she sat in a Negro house, surrounded by Negro families, while the younger members of her family played in the street with Negro children, that the Scottsboro authorities had promised her she could see the execution of the "Niggers" - the nine black lads who were to be killed merely for being Negroes.
The Alleged Rape
According to Victoria's testimony, a Negro identified at the trial as Charlie Weems came first waving a pistol, followed by the others in the crowd. A mile or two past Stevenson, Victoria said that the Negroes began fighting with the white boys, shouting "unload, you white sons-of-bitches" and forcing the white boys to jump from the freight which was moving at a fast rate of speed. One of the white boys, Orvil Gilley, who said he was afraid to jump for fear he would be killed, was allowed by the Negroes to remain. One of the Negroes testified that he pulled Gilley back upon the car as he was hanging over the edge for fear he might fall between the cars and be killed. The local papers reporting the trial, however, claimed that he was forced to remain out of viciousness to witness the alleged assault.
In 1931, when the alleged rape aboard the Southern Railroad occurred, Price was a twenty-one-year old spinner at the Margaret cotton mill in Huntsville making $1.20 a day. The Margaret mill was old and dilapidated and fighting a losing battle against the Depression, leaving Price with only five or six days of work a month. It was an unsuccessful job-hunting trip to Chattanooga that put Price and her co-worker Ruby Bates on the same March 25th train as nine black down-on-their-luck teens who would become known as the Scottsboro Boys.
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Here nine of the Negroes were seized by an armed posse of officers and men. The other Negroes had left the train before it arrived at Paint Rock and nothing more has been heard from them. A report appeared in the press some days after the trial that two Negroes were captured and an attempt made to identify them as members of the crowd of nine Negroes in the Scottsboro case. Nothing more was said about it, so the attempt apparently fell through.
There was no father in evidence in either the families of Victoria Price or Ruby Bates.
Negroes Tried in Four Separate Cases
The defense did not ask for severance but was willing to have all nine negroes tried together. The State, however, demanded that they be tried in four separate cases. For the first case, two of the oldest of the boys were chosen by the prosecution. Clarence Norris, of Molina, Georgia, 19 years old, and Charlie Weems, of 154 Piedmont Avenue, Atlanta, Ga., 20 years old, were the defendants selected for the initial trial.
Plausibility of the Charges Questioned
The International Labor Defense, which had representatives on the scene at the time of the trial in Scottsboro, and whose attorney, George Chamlee, of Chattanooga, later made investigations of various phases of the case not brought out at the trial, claims that when the two girls were taken from the train at Paint Rock, they made no charges against the Negroes, until after they were taken into custody; that their charges were made after they had found out the spirit of the armed men that came to meet the train and catch the Negroes, and that they were swept into making their wholesale accusation against the Negroes merely by assenting to the charges as presented by the men who seized the nine Negroes.
He had not been called to testify in the first trials, even though he witnessed whatever took place in the open freight car with Price and Bates. 14.
Mr. Steven Roddy, attorney for the defense from Chattanooga, was undoubtedly intimidated by the position in which he found himself. At the beginning of the trial he had asked not to be recorded as the lawyer in the case, begging the judge to leave Milo Moody, Scottsboro attorney appointed by the Judge as lawyer for the defense, on record as counsel for the Negroes with himself appearing purely in advisory capacity as representing the parents and friends of the boys in Chattanooga. He made little more than half-hearted attempts to use the formalities of the law to which he was entitled, after his motion for a change of venue made at the beginning of the trial was overruled. It might be said for him, of course, that taking the situation as it was, he felt it was hopeless for him to attempt to do anything much, except make motions for a new trial after the convictions, which he did.
White 19. Who said that his presence cost them the case/ resulted in a guilty verdict for the defendants for the second time? He testified for the defense in the 1933 trial of Heywood Patterson and became a "star witness" when he spoke at mass protest rallies.
RUBY BATES TELLS STORY
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She and Boy Companion Speak at
Scottsboro Protest Here
Ruby Bates, surprise defense witness at the Decatur (Ala.) trial of Heywood Patterson, and Lester Carter, the white boy with her on the Scottsboro train, who also testified for the defense, made their first public appearance last night at a protest meeting attended by more than 5,000 at the St.
Nicholas Arena, Sixty-sixth Street and Columbus Avenue.
Samuel Leibowitz and George W. Chamlee, defense counsel, also spoke at the meeting, which was arranged by the National Scottsboro Action Committee as a prelude to the protest "march" to Washington which is scheduled to start from Union Square at 10 O'clock this morning.
Both the Bates girl and Carter declared the "Scottsboro boys are innocent." The girl, who testified at the first trial that she was attacked by the Negroes, said she told a false story "because I was excited by the ruling class of the South."
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