Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (53 page)

This is not an ex post facto deduction on my part, nor a fancif ul rearrangement of sequences.
It
is a critical truth about Scottsboro. Early observers on the scene had also considered the time element a matter of some significance. Hollace Ransdell, a white woman sent south by the American Civil Liberties Union to conduct a private investigation of the Scottsboro case, filed her report to the ACLU in May,
1931,
one month af ter the initial verdict. In it she stated that George Chamlee, the ILD attorney from Chattanooga who followed the case from the very beginning, was certain "that when the two girls were taken from the train at Paint Rock they made no charges against the Negroes until they were taken into custody; that their charges were made af ter 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 wholesale accusation against the Negroes merely by assenting to the charges as presented by the men who seized the nine Ne groes."* Mary Heaton Vorse, writing in The New
Republic
in

*
Hollace Ransdell obtained personal interviews with both young women, their mothers, neighhors and local social workers ( the fathers had long van ished from the home ) . She pointed out with prescience that the quick-witted Victoria Price prided herself on being able to give the prosecution what it needed, thus becoming the star witness and courtroom pet, while the less articulate Ruby Bates had been shoved into the background and was seething with resentment. Two years later Ruby Bates exploded her bombshell.

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i933, said tersely, "The girls in overalls, fearing a vagrancy charge, then accused the Negro boys of assault." This lucid explanation of the origin of the rape complaint later got lost in the avalanche of Scottsboro publicity.

Af ter Ruby Bates made her spectacular recantation in the second trial of "ringleader" Haywood Patterson-Victoria Price desperately stuck to her original story and even embellished upon it-a new jury of twelve white men still voted a sentence of death.
It
was then that Judge James
E.
Horton, the "good" judge of the Scottsboro trials, set aside Patterson's conviction and ordered a third trial. He hadn't believed Victoria Price, and it cost him his judicial career in the next election. But Judge Horton's legal opin ion did not explore the reasons why a jury of his white brothers might feel emotionally driven to convict a black man for rape and sentence him to death on insubstantial evidence. Nor did he stick to unraveling "the uncorroborated, improbable testimony of the prosecutrix." Horton had a grander theme, one tha t reached back to man's oldest suspicions.

"History, sacred and profane," he wrote, "and the common experience of mankind teaches that women of the character shown in this case are prone for selfish reasons to make false accusations both of rape and of insult upon the slightest provocation, or even without provocation for ulterior purposes . . . . The tendency on the part of the women shows they are predisposed to make false accusations upon any occasion whereby their selfish ends may be gained."

Blaming Scottsboro on the predisposition of a certain class of woman to make false accusations was an easy handle for the liberal mentality to grasp. Trouble was a white woman of murky virtue the root of all evil-how neatly everything fell into place, how cleanly white men were absolved of guilt.

A study of penalties for rape in Louisiana from i900 to i950 showed that thirty-seven blacks had been duly executed by the state yet only two whites had met that extreme fate during the same fif ty-year period. A study of .executions for rape or attempted rape in Virginia during the years i908 to 1963 showed that fif ty-six black and no whites had been given the maximum penalty. As Southern white men continued to round up black men, lynch them or try them in a courtroom and give them the maximum sentence for the holy purpose of "protecting their women," Northern lib—

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erals looking at the ghastly pattern through an inverted prism saw the picture of a lying white woman crying rape-rape-rape.

In
i951 the last Scottsboro "Boy," by then a man of thirty

eight, had finally won his freedom, his name superseded in the pantheon of obscure Southern black men suddenly elevated to the position of international martyr by a succession of new cases, new trials, new convictions and death sentences pronounced in South ern courts for interracial rape, and corresponding new picket lines, petitions and protest rallies staged by leftists in the North and in Europe. The early fif ties were a bad time for the American lef t. Its own house was under sharp attack from McCarthyism, the McCar ran Act, the House Un-American Activities Committee, the Rosenberg case and the patriotic, anti-Red fervor whipped up by the Korean War. To Communists and those within their orbit who believed in the political strategy of mass action built around an emotional symbol, the Southern interracial rape case came to epitomize everything that was rotten or unjust about the American way of life.
It
was also a dramatic focal point for civil-rights efforts, the one last area in which the beleaguered Communist Party could

-and did-have an effect that rippled beyond its diminishing ranks.

As a natural outgrowth of its
politik,
the Communist Party deliberately propagandized a series of interracial rape cases as sym

bolic of the perfidy of the American system. The injustice of Southern justice when it came to blacks was pronounced in many areas above and beyond the issue of rape and a sentence of death. When an authentic, black-originated Southern civil-rights move ment got off the ground in the nineteen sixties, the new movement started not with symbolic cases but with pragmatic efforts at lunch counter desegregation and voter registration. But rape had the historic violence of Southern lynch law behind it, a rape case had inherent drama, and a rape story could be told in such a fashion as to convince a listener of guilt or innocence or reasonable doubt. Moreover, many people outside the lef t were opposed to capital punishment ( the Communist Party wasn't ) , particularly for a crime that did not take a life. Even more people cherished male biased doubts that a woman could be raped against her will. All things considered, the lef t had done well, comparatively, on Scotts boro-as well as or better than it had done on the Haymarket case, Joe Hill, Tom Mooney, or Sacco and Vanzetti. Lives had been

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saved and thousands of new people had been politicized during the struggle. Liberals who were unwilling to buy the Jeff s political and economic reasons for the historic oppression of blacks could mourn the tragedy of the South's mucked-up sexual racial relations, prefer ring to see sex, rather than politics or economics, as the root cause of a host of evils from segregation to genocide. And sex, of course, meant women.

Just once, as far as I have been able to determine, did the lef t go all out to publicize a rape case from the victim's perspective. In September, i944, Recy Taylor, a twenty-four-year-old wife and mother, and a black woman, was abducted and raped by a gang of whites as she lef t. a nighttime service of the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Despite a confession from one member of the gang who named his accomplices, a grand jury repeatedly refused to indict the young men. A national Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor ("Send contributions to treasurer, Hon. Hulan Jack") tried to keep the case alive by distrib uting a pamphlet written by Earl Conrad, the biographer of Har riet Tubman, and Eugene Gordon, a black newspaperman .

.
Gordon's contribution to the effort came as close as the lef t ever came to a feminist analysis of rape, a flash forward into the rhetoric of the seventies:

The attack on Mrs. Taylor was an attack on all women. Mrs. Taylor is Negro. But the only reason a black woman was singled out was that owing to economic, social and political inequality estab lished during and held over from slavery, she was unprotected, and, therefore, easy prey. A part of her helplessness came from the fact that the criminals believed they wouldn't be punished. The black woman, and not the white, is generally the object of debasement, but only because the black woman is less well protected economi cally and socially. The white woman is safe only to a degree above the safety of the black woman. No woman is safe or free until all women are free.

Recy Taylor never secured her equal justice arid the Conrad Gordon pamphlet remains an anomaly in lef t-wing literature. The lef t was more at ease politicizing rape as "rape," a fantasy charge designed to kill black men.

We Charge Genocide, the famous petition to the United Nations that was widely circulated by the Civil Rights Congress in

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1951
( the Congress replaced the disbanded International Labor Defense as the left's mass-protest organization for civil-rights activ ities ) , devoted several paragraphs of hard-line rhetoric to a defini tion of "rape" as "one of the methods of the conspiracy whereby finance joins with the state and terrorist organizations to disfran chise Americans for political power and private profit":