The Railroading of the Scottsboro Boys Prompts Two Landmark Supreme Court Decisions
Scottsboro, Alabama – 1931
Nine black teenagers hoboing on a freight train during the Depression barely escape lynching on false charges of rape by two white prostitutes. The Scottsboro Boys then faced death sentences from a travesty of a trial before an all-white-male jury drawn from a whites-only jury pool. The U.S. Supreme Court declares that the constitutional right to counsel in death penalty cases means competent counsel and that the right to a fair trial prohibits systematic exclusion of black citizens from the jury pool.
False Charges of Gang Rape Set the Stage for Hawaiian Statehood
Honolulu, Hawaii – 1931–1932
A gang rape trial ends in a hung jury following evidence that five Pacific islanders were framed by police for the alleged assault of Thalia Massie, wife of Navy lieutenant Tommie Massie. Massie, his mother-in-law and two friends then commit an “honor killing” of one of the defendants and themselves face murder charges. Clarence Darrow defends them in his last case. Racial polarization alarms the armed forces stationed in the territory. Congress and President Hoover become involved amid fears of civil war. When the truth of the made-up rape later emerges, political alliances among island minorities help launch Hawaii as our 50th state.
Law Enforcement Helps Cover Up Key Evidence in “The Crime of the Century”
Hunterdon County, New Jersey – 1932–1936
As kidnap for ransom became common in the Depression, the reported kidnapping of the infant son of America’s most celebrated aviator caused a national frenzy, embarrassing the New Jersey State Police for their failure to solve the headline crime. Numerous suspects were arrested and let go before Lindbergh himself helped pin the crime on illegal immigrant carpenter, Bruno Richard Hauptmann. Many experts cite the case as a prime example of a travesty of justice.
The deeply problematic handling of the Lindbergh kidnapping case from start to finish provides a classic example of the “hard truths” FBI director James Comey broadly acknowledged in his speech at Georgetown University in February 2015. The early 20th century headline trials in this book provide teaching moments for us all. Everyone willing to reexamine our cultural heritage with clear eyes is helping diverse elements of our society move toward mutual respect and to champion “justice for all.”
INTRODUCTION
This book looks back at riveting early 20th century criminal “trials of the century” as a cultural backdrop for divisive issues we face as a nation today. What can we learn from these trials? Plenty. We start with a remarkable speech two years ago by a public servant then basking in bipartisan praise. In February 2015, former FBI Director James Comey was not the center of controversy that he became just a year and a half later. That month, it was racial prejudice, not his conclusions about the use of Hillary Clinton’s email server or the tumult surrounding his dismissal by President Donald Trump that loomed large in Comey’s mind. Then only in his second year as head of our nation’s chief law enforcement agency, the former Deputy Attorney General eagerly accepted an invitation from Georgetown University to speak on Lincoln’s birthday about the highly-charged topic of race bias.
Georgetown’s early history included profiting from the slave trade (for which it has recently issued a formal apology). Yet less than a decade after the Civil War, Georgetown embraced emancipation by appointing the nation’s first African-American university president, the son of a former slave. When Comey took the podium on Lincoln’s birthday in February 2015, the new FBI head took the opportunity to confess his own agency’s past sins. He candidly admitted what no one in his position had ever owned up to – an ugly truth about the office long identified with J. Edgar Hoover. Comey conceded the historic bias of both his agency and state and local police: “All of us in law enforcement must be honest enough to acknowledge that much of our history is not pretty. At many points in American history, law enforcement enforced the status quo . . . that was often brutally unfair to disfavored groups.” The FBI director’s remarks were particularly forceful because Comey had served as U.S. Attorney and later Deputy Attorney General under President George W. Bush, years before Bush’s Democratic successor, Barack Obama, named him to head the FBI. So it was a transcendent moment when Comey chose this special platform during Black History month to invite all Americans to reexamine our “cultural inheritance” with fresh eyes.1
The next day a federal judge in Mississippi provided a stunning example of the changing times when he sentenced three young white men for a spate of hate crimes committed in 2011. Just the year before those crimes, Judge Carlton Reeves was sworn in as only the second African-American federal trial judge ever appointed in a state with a population historically more than one-third black. Explaining the lengthy sentences he imposed, Judge Reeves detailed in graphic terms how the white defendants appearing before him gleefully recruited others to join them in “a 2011 version of the nigger hunts” that, in the decades from the 1880s to the 1960s, resulted in the deaths of over 4700 blacks – a figure that includes “legal lynchings” (patently unfair speedy trials followed by too hasty executions) as well as torture killings and hangings at the hands of mobs.
Judge Reeves observed that in Mississippi’s past, even if a grand jury were convened to investigate a lynching by white supremacists, and even in cases where they openly carried out the murders, the official inquiry would likely be dropped with the notation “died at the hands of persons unknown.” He concluded: “The legal and criminal justice system operated with ruthless efficiency in upholding what these defendants would call White Power . . . Today . . . black and white, male and female . . . work together to advance the rule of law [for a] criminal justice system [which] must operate without regard to race, creed or color.”2
Before deciding on the appropriate prison sentences for the young men in his courtroom, Justice Reeves considered letters submitted by family and friends to show the youths’ general good character apart from the horrific crime they had committed. He then posed this question: “How could hate, fear or whatever it was transform genteel, God-fearing, God-loving Mississippians into mindless murderers and sadistic torturers?”3 But it was not just God-fearing White Southerners who tried to justify their inhumane conduct towards their fellow man, nor solely African-Americans who were victims of domestic terrorists. As FBI Director Comey pointed out in his 2015 speech, his own Irish-American ancestors also