Heyward Patterson was one of the ten people killed in the Buffalo massacre last week. His name reminded me of Haywood Patterson, one of the nine young Black men falsely accused, arrested, and sentenced to prison in the 1930s.
According to several accounts of the encounter, the Black youths got the best of the whites and threw them off the train, and they took their complaint to the local sheriff who telegraphed the information ahead to the next station where the youths were arrested. At the time of the arrests two white women were also taken into custody from the train, both dressed like men and accused the Blacks of raping them.
Thus began one of the celebrated cases in American jurisprudence with a number of political groups rushing to defend the accused, including the NAACP, the Communist Party of America, and the International Labor Defense . It was often these groups that staged the defense rallies giving the Scottsboro Boys, as they came to be known, national and international exposure far beyond the little towns from which they sprung.
We have posted one of the many pieces of literature distributed by the ILD, whose national secretary was William Patterson, and of no akin to the accused. Those notices often depicted the nine youths, and on this one Janie Patterson, Haywood’s mother is featured. This was usual practice by the ILD and its aim to heighten and dramatize the case.
The Daily Worker, a publication of the Communist Party, placed the arrival of Mrs. Patterson on the front page of the April 11, 1933, edition of the paper, noting that she would be speaking that evening at Union Square. What the mothers did for their sons, the Scottsboro Boys, would be replicated again and again, from Mamie Mobley, the mother of Emmett Till, down to Gwen Garner, the mother of Eric Garner.
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