It was the year of 1931 and the United States, the richest country in the world, faced the toughest of collective miseries. The entire economic scheme had collapsed and, to boost consumerism, President Hoover himself, in delirious speeches, said: "A good patriot is one who has a radio equipment in his house, and acquires a debt to have two."
Always, in those seas of poverty, there were some more shipwrecked than others. They were the blacks who suffered racism as virulent as ever. And on a train carrying unemployed day laborers, a group of whites left their car to attack the blacks who were in the freight car. The attack was so brutal that the police lowered the white attackers from the train.
But these ran to a police station, and they filed a lawsuit against the blacks, who were all arrested in the next station. There were a total of nine children between 9 and 17 years old. Two white girls, who were looking for work somewhere, were traveling with them as stowaways. They were called Vicky Price and Ruby Bates, 21 years old. In order not to accuse them of vagrancy and prostitution, a judge forced them to declare that they had been kidnapped and raped by the group of black detainees.
In a few days, in lightning trial, before the horror of the world, all the blacks were condemned to the electric chair, except a 12-year-old boy sentenced to life imprisonment. Although outside the courtroom, more than 10,000 people, with powerful bands, demanded capital punishment for all. The same defense lawyer, Samuel Leibowitz, a Jew who had traveled from New York to attend to the accused without any fee, was threatened with death, but continued to the end.
It was demonstrated, by medical examinations, that there never were violations. And Vicky and Ruby, who in effect practiced prostitution, withdrew when they heard the death sentence against the accused.
In the end, due to intense national and international pressure, in an act of suspicious mercy, capital sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. And the last survivor of the convicts, Clarence Norris, who had entered prison as a child, was pardoned, on turning 60, by the governor of Alabama in 1976.
But those are not stories from the past. As an American writer said, the past has not been overcome. It is not even past.
Here, blacks are not doing very well either:
