Due at the beginning of class: graphic organizer on Black Boy
Homework for Thursday: vocabulary 10 handout in class; copy below
Quiz on Frome vocabulary Tuesday. This is the one we did not get to before the break. Matching. I put them again at the end of this blog, in case you have misplaced yours.
In class: 1) content quiz on Wright's Black Boy
2) We are reading a recent article from The Guardian newspaper on the Scottsboro Boys. Why? Because as you know, Wright grew up during the Jim Crow era in the south. The story of the Scottsboro Boys took place in 1935 in Mississippi, very close to where Wright lived. The tone of Wright's biography Black Boy is echoed in the blatant racism and miscarriage of justice that, as the article shows, resonates today.
Scottsboro Boys pardon nears as Alabama comes to terms with its past
Infamous 1931 miscarriage of justice close to being reversed as state government considers law to allow for pardon
Growing up in Scottsboro, Sheila Washington had never heard of the case. Now, she is the founder of the Scottsboro boys museum. Photo: Ed Pilkington/The Guardian
Sheila Washington vividly recalls the day she first learned about the terrible events that occurred in her small town in Alabama almost three decades before she was born. She was 17 years old and, rooting around for something beneath her bed, she discovered a dusty old book that bore the town's name in its title.
Scottsboro Boy was a memoir by Haywood Patterson, one of nine young black boys who in 1931 became entangled in one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice of the Jim Crow era. Wrongfully accused of raping two white girls, the nine came close to being lynched by an angry mob, were rushed to trial in front of an all-white jury, and ended up serving many years in jail, eight of them on death row.
Yet young Sheila Washington had never heard a single word of the story of the "Scottsboro Boys", as they were then called, despite having been born and brought up in the small town where such visceral history had been made. When her father found her reading the memoir he snatched the volume from her hands and ordered her never to open it again. "He said he didn't want me to know the harmful things that were contained inside," she says.
The injunction clearly failed to stick, because today Washington is on the verge of making her own history in relation to the Scottsboro Nine. A campaign she started four years ago to clear the names of the nine is bearing fruit – the Alabama senate has already voted unanimously to introduce a new law that would pave the way for the posthumous pardon of the men, and this week the state's House of Representatives is expected to follow suit.
"They were left hanging in the balance," Washington says, speaking in the disused church she converted in 2009 into the Scottsboro Boys Museum and Cultural Center. "The spirit of those young boys are still asking that this be done, that this must be done."
Arthur Orr, a Republican state senator in Decatur, a town about 50 miles from Scottsboro that hosted some of the retrials of the teenagers, was inspired by Washington to sponsor the bill that will allow the posthumous pardon to go ahead. He says the move is not just about righting an historical wrong – it is about modern-day Alabama.
"Those individuals are of course long since deceased, but this is important for the state of Alabama," he says. "We can't change what happened to the Scottsboro Boys but we can change this, and by doing it we can show that Alabama is a much different place than it was 80 years ago, or even 50 or 40."
Paradoxically, the Scottsboro Nine had nothing to do with Scottsboro. On the night of 25 March 1931 the boys – the youngest 12, the oldest 19 – were hoboing on a freight train heading west to Memphis, Tennessee, when some of them got into a fight with a group of white youths. The white boys jumped off the train as it passed through the Scottsboro area and complained to the local sheriff that they had been attacked, and with that one dubious claim Southern justice cranked into motion.
By the time the train reached the next stop a posse of armed local white men had formed and the group went from carriage to carriage, arresting all the blacks they could find. As they were searching the train, they also came across two white women, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates.
It's hard from the distance of 80 years to appreciate fully what it meant for white women to be found even in the vicinity of black men in 1931. Any physical contact, however remote, was taboo.
That taboo probably explains why one of the women, Price, invented the story that she and Bates had been gang raped – it was a ruse to avoid any risk of being jailed overnight herself. For the black young men accused of raping the two white woman, the risk was of a different magnitude. In the 1930s Deep South it meant only one thing: death. As the Arkansas poet John Gould Fletcher put it, if a white woman swears that a black man even tried to rape her, "we see to it that the Negro is executed".
When the nine terrified boys were taken to the nearest town, Scottsboro, and put in the local jail, there was only one question that needed settling: would they be executed judicially or at the end of a rope slung from the nearest tree. There were 13 lynchings in the US in 1931, and the nine came very close to dramatically inflating that figure – the sheriff had to call in the National Guard to hold back a large and angry mob.
Lynchings thwarted, it was then a question of getting the nine legally executed as rapidly as possible. They were put on trial 12 days after their arrest, having met their two defence lawyers – one of whom hadn't defended a case in years, while the other was a specialist in real estate law – just half an hour before the trial opened.
The only evidence connecting the defendants to the alleged rapes was the testimony of Price herself. Running counter to that was the testimony of doctors who said there was no physical evidence of rape, yet that counted for nothing: within two weeks of the fateful train ride through Scottsboro, eight of the defendants found themselves on death row (only the youngest, Roy Wright, escaped with a long prison sentence).
Remarkably, the story of the Scottsboro Nine keeps giving up its secrets, more than 80 years after the event. Sonny Craig, a retired investment manager, has told the Guardian how the events powerfully impacted upon his family – a story that has never before been publicly recorded.
'Those young men were innocent; everybody knew'
Craig was about 13 when he discovered that his father, Irwin Craig, had sat on the jury at the Decatur retrial of Haywood Patterson, the author of the book Sheila Washington found beneath her bed. It was 1958, and Sonny Craig was working as a newspaper delivery boy when he came across a faded copy of the Decatur Daily from 1933 with a photo of his father and the other jurors on the front page.
Craig asked his father why he had never mentioned having being involved in such a major trial. "He said it was something he wasn't particularly proud of. Those young men were innocent; everybody knew that but they were going to be punished for what they didn't do."
Craig has no way of confirming the story, but he is convinced that his father, a deeply religious man who died in 1970, was telling him the truth about a traumatic event that changed his life. His father recalled that when the jury came to deliberate its verdict, Irwin, whose nickname was "Red" after the colour of his hair, was the only one of the 12 who refused to send the boys to their deaths, creating a hung jury as a result.
Because of this principled stance, the Ku Klux Klan paid a visit to the Craig home and staked a burning cross in the family yard. Sonny Craig's uncle stood on the doorstep with a shotgun to protect the household.
With the town at boiling point, "Red" was called in to see the judge presiding over the retrial, James Horton, who exhorted him to change his vote to guilty. "If you don't, they will kill you, Red," the judge said.
Irwin Craig protested: "I can't change my vote, judge." But Horton replied: "Don't worry about that, I'll take care of it." And the rest, Sonny Craig says, is history.
The rest was indeed history. Judge Horton carried out one of the great heroic acts of the Jim Crow period – an act that preceded the heroism of Rosa Parks on the bus by 22 years. After the jury returned with an unanimous "guilty" for Haywood Patterson – despite the fact that by then Ruby Bates had admitted in court that the rape was a fabrication – Horton announced that he was setting aside the verdict and indefinitely postponing all further retrials on the grounds that a fair hearing was impossible. His extraordinary courage in the face of extreme local hostility was repaid the following year when he was roundly defeated at the ballot box and thrown out of his job.
Despite the outstanding bravery of Judge Horton – and of the team of liberal lawyers led by a New York attorney, Samuel Leibowitz, and backed by the American Communist party, who endured countless death threats in the attempt to secure the boys a proper defence, the intensity of prejudice in Alabama was just too powerful to resist. The boys all spent long years in prison, the last one to be released emerging as late as 1950. One, Ozie Powell, was shot while in jail and permanently brain damaged. Only one – Clarence Norris – was pardoned when alive, in 1976.
'I was told as a child to fear the white man'
The events of that train journey through Scottsboro in 1931 sent a chill that spread right across the black community in the South. JD Stevens, a Scottsboro resident aged 80, remembers how what happened was invoked as a cautionary tale during his childhood in Alabama.
"I was told as a child to fear the white man. If you spoke up for what was right, nine times out of 10 they would kill you. My daddy, he was more scared of a white man than he was a rattle snake."
For Stevens, a posthumous pardon for the nine would be an important statement "that our community is moving towards equal opportunity and justice".
Mary Abernathy, another local, believes the pardon would lift a blight that has hung over the town since 1931. She also thinks it would have contemporary significance, as racial discrimination remains a part of contemporary life in Alabama.
"Have we lived up to the promise of treating people as equals? I don't think so. Today we are still wrestling with the portrayal of different ethnic groups as 'us' and 'them'."
But Abernathy can also speak to the one positive feature to have emerged from the sorry treatment of the Scottsboro Nine. Her father was called as a witness in the retrial of Haywood Patterson by Samuel Leibowitz, who wanted to put the lie to the prosecution claim that Alabama juries were invariably white-only because there were no qualified black men to take a place.
Abernathy's father, John Sanford, was an eminently qualified African American – he was educated, well spoken, respected. His appearance in the witness stand was another act of supreme courage, given the baying crowd that attended the trial, and he was given a brutal grilling by the prosecutor, who referred to him throughout as "John". "You are not going to bully this witness, call him Mr Sanford," Leibowitz interjected, to gasps from the public benches.
Out of Sanford's testimony, a new hope was brought to America. Leibowitz took the issue of the all-white juries right up to the US supreme court, which in April 1935 issued a landmark ruling that is still regularly invoked today: that black people could not be excluded from juries on racial grounds.
Abernathy remembers her father telling her about the trial and about the Scottsboro Nine, and the clear message that he gave her: "He didn't want us to be hateful and spiteful and angry. He didn't want us to grow up to be prejudiced about white people."
Sheila Washington says that she will not rest until the governor of Alabama, Robert Bentley, has enacted the bill that will allow the posthumous pardons to go ahead. She is trying to persuade him to sign the legislation on the same wooden bench, still stored on an upper floor of the Scottsboro courthouse, on which the boys' death sentences were signed.
That day, she says, will be the fulfillment of a dream she has held since she first picked up Haywood Patterson's book. "It gave me a passion, that one day I would hold that book, burn a candle, and set things right for the Scottsboro Boys."
This autumn, Kander and Ebb's musical The Scottsboro Boys will receive its UK premiere at London's Young Vic Theatre, directed by five-time Tony Award winner Susan Stroman.
Vocabulary 10 definitions
1. askance (adverb)- with suspicion, distrust or disapproval; skeptically; suspiciously
2. attenuate (verb) – to make thin or slender, to weaken or lessen in force, intensity or value; dilute; water down
3. benign (adj)- gentle, kind; forgiving, understanding; having a favorable or beneficial effect; not malignant; salutary; salubrious
4. cavil (verb)- to find fault in a petty way, carp; nitpick, quibble (noun)- a trivial objection or criticism
5. charlatan (noun) – one who feigns knowledge or ability; a pretender, imposter or quack
6. decimate (verb)- to kill or destroy a large part of; ravage, devastate
7. foible (noun)- weak point, failing, minor flaw; shortcoming, defect, quirk
8. forgo (verb)- to do without, abstain from, give up; renounce
9. fraught (adj)- full or loaded with; accompanied by; charged with
10. inure (verb)- to toughen, harden’ render used to something by long subjection or exposure; accustom, acclimate
11. luminous (adj)- emitting or reflecting light, glowing; radiant, bright, refulgent
12. obsequious (adj)- marked by slavish attentiveness; excessively submissive, often for purely self-interested reasons.
13. obtuse (adj)- blunt, not coming to the point; slow or dull in understanding; not causing a sharp impression; stupid, dumb, thick
14. oscillate (verb)- to swing back and forth with a steady rhythm, to fluctuate or waver; vibrate, vacillate
15. penitent (adj)- regretful for one’s sins or mistakes; (noun) one who is sorry for wrongdoing; repentant; regretful, rueful, sorry
16. peremptory (adj)- having the nature of a command that leaves no opportunity for debate, denial or refusal; high-handed, unconditional
17. rebuff (verb) to snub; to repel, drive away, spurn, repulse, reject; (noun) a curt rejection; a check; a set back
18. reconnoiter (verb)- to engage in reconnaissance; to make a preliminary inspection; scout
19. shambles (noun)- a slaughterhouse; a place of mass bloodshed; a state of complete disorder and confusion, mess
20. sporadic (adj)- occurring at irregular intervals, having no set plan or order; intermittent, spasmodic
Vocabulary 10, exercise 1 Use correct form
1. Life on the family farm has __________________________me to hard physical labor and long hours of unremitting toil.
2. The general sent scouts on ahead of the army to _________________________ the area for a suitable site to pitch camp.
3. Although there had been some ____________________________ fighting earlier, the real battles of the Civil War did not begin until Bull Run in July, 1861.
4. Unless the title Special Aide to the Assistant Section Manager involves a salary increase, I would just as soon _______________________ it.
5. The riot converted the quiet streets of that suburban community into a ghastly ______________________________.
6. Although the moon appears to be a(n) ______________________________ body, the fact is that it only reflects light received from the sun.
7. As all kinds of wild rumors ran rampant through the besieged city, the mood of the populace _________________________ between hope and despair.
8. Good supervisors know that they can get more cooperation from their staff by making polite requests than by issuing __________________________ orders.
9. The man’s personality was a strange mixture of strengths and weaknesses, fortes and _____________________________.
10. I was totally taken aback when they ___________________________ my kind offers of assistance so rudely and nastily.
11. No doubt he’s very sorry he got caught, but that does not mean that he’s at all _____________________ about what he did.
12. Any “investment counselor” who promises to double your money overnight must be regarded as a(n) _____________________________ or crook.
13. Though my childhood recollections have been ______________________________ by the passage of time, they have not been totally effaced from my memory.
14. In a typical James Bond movie, Agent 007 has a series of adventures that are _____________________________ with tongue-in-cheek peril.
15. His statements have been so uniformly _______________________ that I get the impression that he is wearing a permanent pair of mental blinders.
16. Though critics ________________________ at minor faults in the new Broadway show, the general public loved it.
17. I was relieved to learn that the tumor on my arm was _________________________ and my worst fears were groundless.
18. We took _________________________ at the program that makes it harder for city dwellers to get out and enjoy the beauties of nature.
19. During the 14th century, the Black Death suddenly swept across Europe , ____________________ the population and paralyzing everyday life.
20. During imperial times, the Roman Senate was little more than a collection of _____________________________ yes-men, intent upon preserving their own lives by gratifying the emperor’s every whim.
Vocabulary 10, exercise 2
1. The English teacher looked ________________________ at the suggestion that students read compendiums of Dicken’s novels.
2. Abraham Lincoln’s sensitive stepmother had a _________________________ influence on the lonely boy who had lost his mother.
3. I suggest that you do not _________________________ over small things but instead focus on what is important.
4. The Inuit have become ____________________________ to the hardships of the long Arctic winters through years of experience.
5. The reporter exposed the real estate agent as a __________________________ who routinely deceived her customers.
6. The terrified narrator in Poe’s story The Pit and the Pendulum watches the dreaded instrument ________________________________ as it slowly moves toward him.
7. Backbiting is one human _______________________________ not likely to be eradicated.
8. One of the best, if not the easiest, ways to lose weight is to _____________________________ dessert.
9. Infantry officers often ask for volunteers to _____________________________ the terrain ahead before ordering their soldiers to advance.
10. Even with the most advanced equipment, expeditions to the top of Mt. Everest
11. Walking under that _______________________________ night sky induced in me weighty thoughts not often pondered.
12. The lieutenant was too _____________________________ to see the danger and led his company right into the hands of the enemy.
13. In the Middle Ages, ______________________________ often confessed their sins publicly and were publicly punished.
14. The board members resented the director’s ____________________________tone of voice.
15. The old man _____________________________ his neighbors by refusing offers of friendship.
16. After making sure the wound was clean, the doctor took steps to __________________________ the victim’s pain.
17. The burglars made a complete _________________________ of the apartment in their search for money and jewelry.
18. Again and again, Napoleon was able to _______________________ the armies of his enemies and lead his men on to further victories.
19. The soldiers heard _____________________________ gunfire from the other side of the river.
20. Jane Austin ridiculed characters that were _______________________________ to the aristocracy but condescending to their social inferiors.
Vocabulary 10, exercise 3
Synonyms
1. quibble over who is at fault ____________________________
2. exposed him as a complete fraud ____________________________
3. vacillated between two choices ____________________________
4. looked skeptically at their proposals ____________________________
5. accustomed to extremes of temperatures _____________________________
6. a storm that ravaged the countryside ___________________________
7. an attempt to scout the interior ____________________________
8. unwilling to renounce her inheritance ___________________________
9. shocked by the mess they had created ___________________________
10. a salutary effect on consumer confidence ____________________________
11. full of suspense and tension ____________________________
12. willing to overlook its defects ___________________________
13. will spurn his offer of marriage __________________________
14. his high-handed challenge to our authority ___________________________
15. in the radiant circle of the spotlight ____________________________
Antonyms
16. measures that may strengthen the economy ____________________________
17. an entirely unrepentant gambler and thief ____________________________
18. her acute handling of the issue _____________________________
19. assumed an overbearing manner ____________________________
20. his constant attention to detail ____________________________
Vocabulary 10, exercise 4
1. We must never allow our passion for justice to be (inured / attenuated) to mere halfhearted
goodwill.
2. I have learned that (sporadic / preemptory) sessions of intense “cramming” can never take the place of a regular study program.
3. Somehow or other, a bull got into the china shop and turned it into a complete (shambles / foibles).
4. The (decimated / penitent) youths agreed to work without pay until they could make restitution for the damage their carelessness had caused.
5. When I found that people I admired were looking (askance / sporadic) at my unconventional clothing, I resolved to remedy the situation.
6. How could you have the heart to (rebuff / cavil) those people’s piteous appeals for aid?
7. Since he didn’t want to give me credit for having done a good job, he took refuge in endless (foibles / cavils) about my work.
8. Imagine the general disappointment when the so-called “miracle cure” was exposed as a fraud promoted by a (charlatan / cavil).
9. Over the years, her (luminous / obtuse) descriptions and scintillating wit have helped her students master the difficult subject she taught.
10. Their relationship has been so (fraught / benign) with strife and malice that I don’t see how they can ever patch things up.
11. Though I admire the woman’s strong points, I find her (rebuffs / foibles) comic.
12. All angles are classified as acute, right, (obtuse / benign) or straight, according to the number of degrees they contain.
13. Though the small nation was always ready to settle a conflict peacefully, it was not afraid to use (luminous / peremptory) force when necessary.
14. At an autocrat’s court, free speech is usually replaced by the (penitent / obsequious) twaddle of self-serving flunkies and toadies.
15. Do you want to be a ballet dancer badly enough to (oscillate / forgo) all other activities?
16. Bank robbers often spend a good deal of time (reconnoitering / rebuffing) the neighborhood in which the bank they intend to rob is located.
17. During the Civil War the ranks of both armies were (decimated / rebuffed) as much by disease as by enemy action.
18. Even though my experiences in battle have (inured / caviled) me to scenes of suffering, I was horrified by the devastation wrought by the tornado.
19. Since he is not guided by firm principles, he (attenuates / oscillates) between the rival factions, looking for support from both of them.
20. We believe that classes taught by teachers with specialized training will have a (sporadic / benign) effect on the troubled children.
1. sardonic: adj. Scornfully or cynically mocking; sarcastic.
2. colloquial: adj. 1. Characteristic of or appropriate to the spoken language or to writing that seeks
the effect of speech; informal. 2. Relating to conversation; conversational.
3. innocuous: adj. 1. Having no adverse effect; harmless. 2. Not likely to offend or provoke to strong
emotion; insipid.
4. reticent: adj. 1. Inclined to keep one's thoughts, feelings, and personal affairs to oneself;
restrained
or reserved in style. 3. Reluctant; unwilling.
5. poignant: adj. Keenly distressing to the mind or feelings: poignant anxiety; profoundly moving; touching: a poignant memory.
6. wraith: n. 1. An apparition of a living person that appears as a portent just before that person's
death. 2. The ghost of a dead person. 3. Something shadowy and insubstantial.
7. wistful: adj. 1. Full of wishful yearning. 2. Pensively sad; melancholy.
8. undulation: n. 1. A regular rising and falling or movement to alternating sides; movement in waves.
9. tenuous: adj. 1. Long and thin; slender: tenuous strands. 2. Having a thin consistency; dilute;
having little substance; flimsy: a tenuous argument.
10. throng: n. 1. A large group of people gathered or crowded closely together; a multitude.
throngs v.tr. 1. To crowd into; fill: commuters thronging the subway platform.2. To press in
to gather, press, or move in a throng.
11. vex: (verb) 1. To annoy, as with petty importunities; bother. 2. To cause perplexity in; puzzle.
12. laden: adj. 1. Weighed down with a load; heavy: "the warmish air, laden with the rains of those
thousands of miles of western sea" Hilaire Belloc. 2. Oppressed; burdened: laden with grief.
13. preclude: 1. To make impossible, as by action taken in advance; prevent. 2. To exclude or prevent (someone) from a given condition or activity: Modesty precludes me from accepting the honor.
14. succumb: (verb) 1. To submit to an overpowering force or yield to an overwhelming desire; give up or give in. 2. To die.
15. foist: (verb) 1. To pass off as genuine, valuable, or worthy: "I can usually tell whether a poet . . . is foisting off on us what he'd like to think is pure invention" J.D. Salinger.
2. To impose (something or someone unwanted) upon another by coercion or trickery: They had extra work foisted on them because they couldn't say no to the boss. 3. To insert fraudulently or deceitfully: foisted unfair provisions into the contract.
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