Long Journey

It took Haywood Patterson 17 years to get from Alabama to the North. His long trip began on a spring day in 1931, when he and eight companions were yanked off a freight train at Paint Rock, Ala., accused of raping two white girls who turned out to be common tramps. It carried him past the shadow of the electric chair three times, through the highest courts of the land and deep into the hard, rotten heart of the Alabama penal system. But in July 1948, Haywood Patterson finally made it. He escaped from Alabama's Kilby prison, crossed the Mason-Dixon line and hid out, a fugitive, an almost forgotten speck on the national conscience--the eighth of the Scottsboro Boys to get out of jail.-

Unsparing Story. When the journey began, Patterson was a gawky Negro of 18, unable to write and barely able to read. When he escaped in 1948 he was a calloused and bitter 35, a veteran of years of prison brutality and evil, and possessed of the one-track eloquence of a man who had pondered his grievances for 17 years. He had also come to believe that his truest friends were the Communists, who had exploited the Scottsboro case for their own ends.

Patterson didn't keep his grievances and his precarious freedom to himself. He went to New York and teamed up with Earl Conrad, a white newspaperman who once worked on a Negro paper, and they turned out Scottsboro Boy, a raw, violent, unsparing book published last month. It was calculated to scrape old wounds and inflame Southern readers.

It was partly a story most of the U.S. dimly remembered--of the trial which sentenced eight of the Negroes to death for rape that probably never was committed, the subsequent court battles which saved their lives and generally opened Southern juries to the Negro. The rest was a gamy tale of Patterson's life in Alabama's Atmore and Kilby prisons. He told of intrigues, knifings, murders, fornications and homosexual acts in prison, and Patterson freely named guards and officials to whom he attributed cruel neglect and brutality.

He also made it clear that he was a pretty tough prisoner to deal with. Patterson particularly invited trouble when he aimed some derogatory remarks at Frank Boswell, the man who is Alabama's Director of Corrections and Institutions.

FBI at the Bus. With a $2,700 advance for his book from Doubleday, his publishers, Patterson traveled about the North, even made an audacious trip down to North Carolina to visit a girl friend. Last week in Detroit, where he was living with a sister and working as a laborer for $1.80 an hour, he was surrounded by four FBI agents as he stepped off a bus. They had arrested him at Alabama's request; it is a federal offense for fugitives to cross state lines to avoid imprisonment.

Sitting in jail with his suspenders loose and his eyes glinting with bitterness, Patterson said hopefully that he couldn't believe Michigan would send him back to Alabama. "Alabama is the rottenest place in the world," said he. "They make criminals there . . . Hell, they [want] to kill me." The Communist-line Civil Rights Congress put up $5,000 to get him out on bail. But unless he can fight extradition, he will be sent back to Alabama, which figures that Haywood Patterson still owes the state 57 years of his life.

*Alabama freed four of the nine in 1937; three others are on parole and another is now wanted for violating his parole.

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