Appalachian History

It has been a custom for more than twenty years to have trade days in Scottsboro on every first Monday in the month; this is also when Probate Court meets. This custom was started by the business men of the town to stimulate and encourage business and it really has had the desired effect as it is almost impossible to get along the streets, and during noon hour it is extremely hard to enter a restaurant or cafe as they are so crowded.

The crowd starts assembling early in the morning, coming in wagons, cars, riding horses, mules and in most every conceivable manner. People coming from all parts of Jackson County, the adjoining counties and adjoining states, bringing with them anything they wish to exchange. You would find almost anything here on these days that is grown in the country.

On one side of the courthouse square you would find the horses and mules and cattle, along with these you would find hay and straw in large quantities. There is some real horse trading and trafficking going on here. Some men make their living in this manner sometimes starting out with a worthless animal of some kind and by a series of good trades, they come out the winner; on the contrary if you are not a good judge of stock you are likely to get gyped.

Main Street, Scottsboro, AL. The postmark date on the back of this postcard is November 20, 1917.

On another side of the square you find the pigs and hogs and it is not an uncommon sight to see a man meandering across the courtyard with a squealing pig in his arms, or you may see them leading dogs around trying to exchange them, and then you see men carrying old guns of various makes and calibers, hunting a trade of some kind.

There are vendors of all kinds such as fruit, vegetables and home made chairs. In one corner of the court yard you find a crowd gathered to hear a preacher (probably Holiness) preach from a truck bed and again you will find the same preacher in a different part of the yard preaching.

In one corner you find a black faced comedian attracting a crowd for a medicine show. More than likely you would find a few darkies scattered around the town well, which is located on the square, strumming on their banjoes and guitars. You would be sure to find string music and singing of some kind on the street.

If during some political campaign you will be certain to hear some speeches, as all the candidates make it a point to be in Scottsboro on first Monday. The crowd starts breaking and going home about three or four o’clock in the afternoon, as some of them have a long distance to travel and some of them may have a difficult time in getting home some of their newly acquired possessions.

After seeing and hearing the squealing pigs, bawling calves and cows, the preaching, string music, black faced comedians, political speeches, humorous conversations and crying babies, you could not come away without a lasting impression of the first Mondays.


Sue Williams, WPA Project
Bridgeport, AL
Jackson County
Oct 5, 1938
WPA Alabama Writer's Project Collection/Alabama Department of Archives and History

On March 25, 1931, local authorities in Paint Rock, AL arrested nine black youths on a freight train after receiving word about a fight between blacks and whites on the train. They discovered two white women, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, dressed in men's overalls on the same train and subsequently charged the nine young men with rape.

The doctor who examined the girls found proof that they had been having sexual intercourse but no reason to conclude that they had been roughly handled, except for a small bruise on one of them which might well have been caused by riding on gravel. This was not Victoria Price’s version of the story: "There were six to me and three to her....It took three of them to hold me," she recalled under oath. "One was holding my legs and the other had a knife to my throat while the other one ravished me."

Four of the "Scottsboro Boys," Roy and Andy Wright, Eugene Williams, and Heywood Patterson, had grown up in Chattanooga, Tennessee; the Wrights were the sons of Ada Wright, a widow and a domestic servant in Chattanooga. Ozie Powell, Clarence Norris, Olen Montgomery, Charlie Weems, and Willie Roberson came from different towns in Georgia and encountered the others for the first time on the train. Olen Montgomery was completely blind in one eye and could barely see out of the other; Willie Roberson suffered from untreated syphilis and could hardly walk.

Presiding judge Alfred E. Hawkins assigned all seven members of the Scottsboro bar to defend the young men, but all of them found excuses not to involve themselves except for seventy-year-old Milo C. Moody.

In Chattanooga, sixty miles away, members of the local Interdenominational Colored Ministers' Alliance raised funds to retain Stephen R. Roddy, a white lawyer from Chattanooga. "I was scared before, but it wasn't nothing to how I felt now," said defendant Norris as the trials got under way. "I knew if a white woman accused a black man of rape, he was as good as dead."

On April 9, 1931, after four separate trials conducted over a four-day period before four different all-white juries in the mountain town of Scottsboro, eight of the defendants were found guilty as charged.

Judge Hawkins promptly sentenced them to death. The case of the ninth defendant-thirteen-year-old Roy Wright-ended in a mistrial after a majority of the jury refused to accept the prosecution's recommendation that he be spared the death penalty because of his extreme youth.

"I was sitting in a chair and one of those girls was testifying," Wright was quoted as saying in a March 10, 1933 New York Times article. "One of the deputy sheriffs leaned over to me and asked if I was going to turn state's evidence, and I said no, because I didn't know anything about this case.

"Then the trial stopped awhile and the deputy sheriff beckoned to me to come out into another room-- the room back of the place where the judge was sitting-- and I went. They whipped me and it seemed like they were going to kill me. All the time they kept saying, "Now will you tell?" and finally it seemed to me like I couldn't stand it no more and I said yes."

Soon after the guilty verdicts, the NAACP and the International Labor Defense came to the defense of the "Scottsboro Boys," contending the trials were unconstitutional. Three more rounds of trials ensued. Ultimately, charges against four of the defendants were dropped, but by that time they had spent over 6 years in prison on death row without trial.

Alabama’s Governor Graves had planned to pardon all of the defendants before he left office in 1938. However, during the customary pre-pardon interview, Graves was angered by the men’s hostility towards him and refusal to admit their guilt, so he did not issue pardons.

sources: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA01/White/anthology/scottsboro.html
www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/106.2/ah000387.html
www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/FTrials/scottsboro/scottsb.htm


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