Scottsboro Case

Crash, crash! went two windows in the U. S. consulate at Dresden. Plump fell a bottle on the consulate's floor. While young German Communists hooted and whistled outside, an American clerk picked up the bottle, found a note: ''We protest the execution of eight young Negro workers in Alabama. Down with American murder and imperialism! For the brotherhood of black and white young proletarians! An end to the bloody lynching of our Negro co-workers!"'

Thus last week did the case of eight blackamoors, condemned to death for rape, take on its first international aspect. Beginning with the same violent methods at U. S. embassies and consulates. Reds made the Sacco-Vanzetti case a world issue.

Two months ago the population of Scottsboro, Ala., temporarily increased five fold. Some 10,000 visitors swarmed to town to be on hand for the trial of nine itinerant Negroes who had been charged with assaulting two white girls. The girls, clad in overalls and accompanied by seven white men, had been '"bumming" their way in a freight car from Chattanooga, Tenn., to Huntsville, Ala., when the Negroes, aged from 14 to 21, boarded the train, pitched out five of the young women's companions, knocked the other two unconscious. Then, the girls said, they were raped. Their assailants were surrounded, overcome by a posse when the train reached Paint Rock, Ala. Within two weeks and two days of the arrest, three juries returned a verdict of guilty against eight of the Negroes. They were sentenced to death in the electric chair on July 10. A mistrial was ordered for the youngest. Throughout the trials, 1,000 National Guardsmen were held in readiness to suppress race disorders.

Startled by the celerity of Alabama justice, the International Labor Defense protested "the legal lynching of Negro workers on framed charges." Liberal and racial organizations began to bestir themselves for an appeal in behalf of the condemned. Although ready with praise for the State's having made "every honest effort to give the accused a fair trial," these groups claimed: 1) that a fair trial was impossible under the circumstances; 2) that physicians were unable to find conclusive evidence of rape on the girls; 3) that the girls were bad, anyway.

While the new defense was being prepared for the Negroes, a split occurred within the ranks of their supporters. The Chattanooga Interdenominational Ministers' Alliance of Negro Divines denounced the International Labor Defense, accused it of interesting itself in the case "mainly for the purpose of drawing Negroes of the South into the Communist organization."

First public figure to enter the altercation was Author Theodore Dreiser, who protested the Scottsboro affair to Governor Miller of Alabama.

Meanwhile the condemned men have made small outcry. Jailed at Gadsden, Ala., one complained: "We just don't like that death sentence."

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