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| The "Scottsboro Boys" |
PBS has an American Experience documentary on the case, Scottsboro: An American Tragedy (2000) Here is a feature on the University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School website on the trials: "The Scottsboro Boys" Trials 1931-1937.
The Scottsboro case became a prominent civil rights cause in the first half of the 1930s. The NAACP competed with the Communist Party-linked International Labor Defense (ILD) group to take over the representation of the accused after their first kangaroo-court trial, with the ILD eventually getting the case. John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss, Jr. give this summary of the case in From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (2003):
... nine young blacks, the youngest of whom was thirteen, were arrested and jailed in Scottsboro, Alabama, and sentenced to death on charges of raping two white women on a freight train. After a fight with NAACP lawyers, ILD lawyers and the Communist party made an international issue of the case. The Supreme Court ordered a new trial when it was proved that at the original trial the defendants did not have adequate counsel. In the new trial the Scottsboro boys were sentenced to terms up to ninety-nine years, but by 1950 the last of them had been released.The Communist Party's involvement with the case gives Owsley's imagination material for considerable creative fantasy. In fact, his fantasies about the Commies are about the only thing about the case that does interest him, as he pretty much admits:
I am not here concerned with the guilt or innocence of the Negroes - though I wish justice done; I am interested in pointing out the meaning of these cases and of the general emotional disturbance in the East over the "injustices" committed in the South against the Negro. I wish to examine the relationship between this new attack upon the South and the former attacks, and by so doing gauge the probably motives and the final results.The "former attacks" to which he refers are the pre-Civil War antislavery movement and the postwar Reconstruction period. His article is a great example of how the pseudohistory of the Lost Cause was used as an ideological framework for the defense of segregation, corrupt Southern justice and white supremacy in real time.
He takes a chronological approach in his essay. But since the present-day (1933) part was his real point, I'm discussing that in this post and taking up the pseudohistory parts in a second one.
After digging through numerous of these Southern Agrarian essays, it becomes a challenge on how to summarize them. The purpose of this series of Confederate "Heritage" Month posts is to highlight how neo-Confederate ideology functions. And Owsley's piece certainly fits the bill. On the other hand, I start to ask myself where does useful scrutiny end and transcribing of dreary segregationist propaganda hackery begin?
Owsley here with his treatment of American Communism goes into the kind of Glenn Beck/John Birch Society conspiracism that has become so much a part of the Republican Party's political understanding of itself now. It probably more accurate to put "Communism" in quotes here, since he's conveying his own view of it, in which the Reds (which meant Communists in those days) and the Herbert Hoover Republicans are both part of Yankee industrialism, which in Southern Agrarian jargon meant the evils of Yankeedom generally, from factories to scary labor labor unions to the even more scary notion of no legal (de jure) racial segregation. I'm not exaggerating: "But today there are two sets of industrialists: the capitalist-industrialists on the one hand and the proletarian-industrialists or Communists on the other."Owsley explains, "The capitalist-industrialists control the Republican Party" while "the Communists ... represent the base of industrialism." And they have formed an "alliance" - that would be the anti-New Deal, labor-hating Hoover Republicans with their Liberty League (a forerunner of today's Koch brothers political operation) teaming up with Earl Browder's Communists - which has "declared war upon the South."
It would be accurate to say that this was divorced from reality and didn't make jack for sense. But it lets Owsley spin page after page of Southern white victimization, whining about how the mean Commie Yankee Republicans are pickin' on us innocent Southern white folks. The emotional and propaganda sense of it lies in the equating opposition to Southern segregationist outrages in any form to Communist revolution, so that Yankee industrialists (presumably of both parties though Owsley is more worried about the Republicans here) can be assumed to share in the Communist Party maximum program which, as Owsley presents it:
It urges the Negro to rise and seize the lands of his oppressors and divide them out. ... It even promises to create a Negro State out of the Southern black belt and grant the Negro autonomy or allow him to secede from the Union. That is, it offers to help the Negro set up a black peasant state formed out of the confiscated or expropriated lands of the white man who is to be either exterminated or completely subordinated to the black race.The Scottsboro case functions mainly for Owsley in this essay as a half-plausible way to equate Yankee industrialism (including Yankee democracy and rule of law) with his image of "Communism," which he then takes into such satisfying flights of white political paranoia and masochistic fantasy. Whatever the faults of the American Communist Party in 1933 may have been, calling for the extermination or complete subordination of "the white man" was not one of them.
Generally, all but the nuttiest paranoid conspiracy theories have some vaguely identifiable relationship to reality, though the relationship in Owsley's case here seems to be into the realm of the clinical. It's true that the Communist Party pulled just over 100,000 votes in the 1932 Presidential election (out of 39.8 million) for William Z. Foster, its Presidential candidate, a whopping 0.3% of the total. That would be the historical high point for its direct electoral influence in both absolute numbers and percentages, though we can't blame Owsley for not knowing that in 1933. It's also true that the official Communist Party position then and for another two decades did call for a "black belt" Negro nation in the majority African-American districts of the South, an odd and impractical idea that was a result of their attempt to articulate a "black nationalist" politics. Foster's and his party's program of that time was laid out in his memorably-titled 1932 book, Toward Soviet America, whose promise to "abolish all restrictions upon racial intermarriage," its praise of "racial amalgamation" and its assertion that "wherever Negroes have half a chance they demonstrate their intellectual equality with the whites" (pp. 305-6, pp. 317-318 of the PDF) would no doubt have been uncomfortable to the Southern Agrarians and their fans.
Actual Communist influence nationally in that period was primarily in the labor movement during the union organizing drives of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s. John L. Lewis as head of the United Mine Workers (UMW) union had fought the Communists in the 1920s - and I do mean fought. But when he became head of the CIO, he welcomed the participation of Communist organizers, because they tended to be determined and tough and shared his goal at that moment of organizing democratic unions free of Mob influence. The Communists did generally take a hard line against white racism, and through the Scottsboro Boys case did have some influence in promoting civil rights activism.
But their political influence in the South could safely be described as minuscule. Owsley was right in saying "the South is probably the greatest obstacle to Communism" in the United States. But to imagine that the Communists and Yankee industrialists were in an alliance to smash the virtuous South for their shared, sinister Yankee purposes - that was just nuts.
Owsley ends by explaining that if the white South decides to crank up the lynch-mob action, well, it will all be the fault of the industrialist-commie-yankee combination against them. The Judge Lowell to whom he refers is federal District Judge James Arnold Lowell (1869–1933), a Warren Harding appointee who refused to allow the extradition of a criminal suspect from Massachusetts to Virginia on 14th Amendment grounds as explained in this Time article, Crawford for Virginia 10/30/1933. Judge Lowell had thus committed a grave offense against the South in Owsley's eyes, making himself part of "the present agitation for 'justice to the Negro' as exemplified in the Scottsboro affair." The Dadeville reference is to yet another case where some damnyankees had thought it appropriate to be concerned about "justice to the Negro" in the South, clearly an odd conception in Owsley worldview:
But in the meantime, before the issues is settled, Communist agitation - and such conduct as Judge Lowell's - is creating a dangerous situation in the South. The criminal Negro, seeing those who have been accused of murder or rape such as the "Scottsboro boys" or the defendants on trial at Dadeville assiduously championed by an outside group, seeing them granted immunity in Judge Lowell's court or, perhaps, even in the Supreme Court, is bound to feel that he himself is above the reach of the law in a Southern State. It is hardly to be supposed that the Southern whites will tolerate such a situation. One has only to read the history of the abolition crusade or more particularly the history of reconstruction to be able to predict what will follow such flagrant interference either by the capitalist industrialists or by Communists. An extra-legal government would quickly spring into existence and such cases as that of the "Scottsboro boys" would be tried in courts whose decrees could not be appealed to a Federal tribunal In other words, the outside interference with the relationship of the whites and blacks in the South can result in nothing but organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and in violent retaliation against the Negroes - themselves often innocent. Such interference makes justice difficult, not only by creating friction between the races, but by arousing anger against those who interfere ... [my emphasis]And this is a highbrow defender of segregation!
For Southern Agrarian Frank Owsley, defending the white South was clearly about more than singing the praises of the family farm and subsistence agriculure, or promoting the healthiness of organic farming. He obviously saw defending "the relationship of the whites and blacks in the South" under Jim Crow segregation as part of that task.
I wonder if Wendell Berry would find it a case of "racist by association" if we associate Owsley with his own words in that passage. Would it be "racist by association" to wonder if that Owsley refers to as "violent retaliation against the Negroes" by Klan types is similar to what his fellow Southern Agrarian Allen Tate had in mind three years earlier when he wrote in their joint project I'll Take My Stand:
We are very near an answer to our question - How may the Southerner take hold of his Tradition?Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, slavery, southern agrarians, us south
The answer is, by violence.
For this answer is inevitable. ...
This method is political, active and, in the nature of the case, violent and revolutionary. Reaction is the most radical of programs; it aims at cutting away the overgrowth and getting back to the roots.
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