Later on I was researching something else I was writing, don't remember what, and came across the story of the Scottsboro Boys. I'd heard of them but didn't know much about their story. Something caught my eye and I read more about them. The quick story is they were 9 black boys accused of raping 2 white girls in the 30's. Their case went from a county courthouse in Alabama to the US Supreme Court. It was eventually dismissed. This case started the civil rights movement.
And it started at that railroad tunnel I'd found. Below is something I copied from a book one of the Scottsboro Boys wrote after the trials were all over. This is what the story will be based on.
The freight train leaving out of Chattanooga, going around the mountain curves and hills of Tennessee into Alabama, it went so slow anyone could get off and back on.
That gave the white boys the idea they could jump off the train and pick up rocks, carry them back on, and chunk them at us Negro boys.
The trouble began when three or four white boys crossed over the oil tanker that four of us colored fellows from Chattanooga were in. One of the white boys, he stepped on my hand and liked to have knocked me off the train. I didn’t say anything then, but the same guy, he brushed by me again and liked to have pushed me off the car. I caught hold of the side of the tanker to keep from falling off.
I made a complaint about it and the white boy talked back— mean, serious, white folks Southern talk.
That is how the Scottsboro case began … with a white foot on my black hand.
“The next time you want by,” I said, “just tell me you want by and I let you by.”
“Nigger, I don’t ask you when I want by. What you doing on this train anyway?”
“Look, I just tell you the next time you want by you just tell me you want by and I let you by.”
“Nigger bastard, this a white man’s train. You better get off. All you black bastards better get off!”
I felt we had as much business stealing a ride on this train as those white boys hoboing from one place to another looking for work like us. But it happens in the South most poor whites feel they are better than Negroes and a black man has few rights. It was wrong talk from the white fellow and I felt I should sense it into him and his friends we were human beings with rights too. I didn’t want that my companions, Roy and Andy Wright, Eugene Williams and myself, should get off that train for anybody unless it was a fireman or engineer or railroad dick who told us to get off.
“You white sons of bitches, we got as much right here as you!”
“Why, you goddamn nigger, I think we better just put you off!”
“Okay, you just try. You just try to put us off!”
Three or four white boys, they were facing us four black boys now, and all cussing each other on both sides. But no fighting yet.
The white boys went on up the train further.
We had just come out of a tunnel underneath Lookout Mountain when the argument started. The train, the name of it was the Alabama Great Southern, it was going uphill now, slow. A couple of the white boys, they hopped off, picked up rocks, threw them at us. The stones landed around us and some hit us. Then the white fellows, they hopped back on the train two or three cars below us. We were going toward Stevenson, Alabama, when the rocks came at us. We got very mad.
When the train stopped at Stevenson, I think maybe to get water or fuel, we got out of the car and walked along the tracks. We met up with some other young Negroes from another car. We told them what happened. They agreed to come in with us when the train started again.
Soon as the train started the four of us Chattanooga boys that was in the oil tanker got back in there—and the white boys started throwing more rocks. The other colored guys, they came over the top of the train and met us four guys. We decided we would go and settle with these white boys. We went toward their car to fight it out. There must have been ten or twelve or thirteen of us colored when we came on a gang of six or seven white boys.
I don’t argue with people. I show them. And I started to show those white boys. The other colored guys, they pitched in on these rock throwers too. Pretty quick the white boys began to lose in the fist fighting. We outmanned them in hand-to-hand scuffling. Some of them jumped off and some we put off. The train, picking up a little speed, that helped us do the job. A few wanted to put up a fight but they didn’t have a chance. We had color anger on our side.
The train was picking up speed and I could see a few Negro boys trying to put off one white guy. I went down by them and told them not to throw this boy off because the train was going too fast. This fellow, his name was Orville Gilley. Me and one of the Wright boys pulled him back up.
After the Gilley boy was back on the train the fight was over. The four of us, Andy and Roy Wright, Eugene Williams and myself, we went back to the tanker and sat the same way we were riding when the train left Chattanooga.
The white fellows got plenty sore at the whupping we gave them. They ran back to Stevenson to complain that they were jumped on and thrown off—and to have us pulled off the train.
The Stevenson depot man, he called up ahead to Paint Rock and told the folks in that little through-road place to turn out in a posse and snatch us off the train.
It was two or three o’clock in the afternoon, Wednesday, March 25, 1931, when we were taken off at Paint Rock.…
Haywood Patterson
“Scottsboro Boy”
1950
Awesome Writing Cody. :-)
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