RACES: Blacks Aflame

It was a roaring cold morning in Scottsboro, Ala. when a truck full of “bad niggers” snorted through the streets and slithered out on an icy road north from town. Scottsboro whites knew they were “bad niggers” because heavy steel mesh sheathed the sides of the truck and its back door was locked. “Good nigger” convicts going out to work the roads ride in ordinary trucks, not cages.

Inside the truck, as it jolted out of town, 22 shivering blackamoors convicted of burglary, manslaughter and assorted felonies lurched and jounced on their benches. As the truck careened, a five-gallon can of gasoline and a big drum just inside the rear door gurgled, churned and occasionally slopped over. Rivulets of gasoline made crazy patterns over the pitching floor. But the cold was worse than the jouncing. Finally a big black buck named Henry pulled a piece of paper from his pocket, held a match to it, dropped it on the floor, holding out his pale palms to warm them over the flames.

For years Negroes in the South have with impunity poured kerosene into their stoves to make wood fires burn brighter. The 22 “bad niggers” were not particularly alarmed when the rivulets on the truck floor took fire from the burning paper. But this was not kerosene but gasoline. A lacework of flames raced across the truck floor. Several men stamped their feet in the burning trickles. Then suddenly the five-gallon can went up in flames. Twenty-two “bad niggers” rushed to the front of the truck, began to holler.

The jouncing cage came to a halt. There were running steps outside, a jingle of keys, a clang as the rear doors were opened. “Jump out, you fools! Jump!” cried a voice. The whites of 44 eyes shone in the fire glare as they looked back into a solid wall of flames. Two dark figures staggered back, lurched through the door, fell on the road outside, afire from head to foot. Two white guards rolled them into the snow-filled ditch to put them out. Then the drum of gasoline went up. . . . When a prison official arrived on the scene, he wired the State Prison at Kilby to ship 20 coffins to Scottsboro.