- Person
- Samuel Leibowitz
- Lived
- 1893–1978
- Field
- Criminal law
- From
- Romanian-American
The story
When Samuel Leibowitz, a celebrated New York criminal lawyer, came to Alabama in 1933 to defend the Scottsboro Boys, he entered a courtroom culture very different from his own. As PBS American Experience puts it, Alabama and New York were worlds apart. In the segregated South of the 1930s, it was common for white officials to address Black adults by their first names, withholding the courtesy titles given to white people.
Leibowitz's first move at the retrial in Decatur was to challenge the exclusion of Black citizens from jury service. Most Black Alabamians had been stripped of the vote by the state's 1901 constitution, and because jurors were drawn from the voter rolls, local officials did not even consider them. To show that qualified Black men existed, Leibowitz called educated and respected Black professionals as witnesses.
One was John Sanford of Scottsboro, as Wikipedia spells his name. Leibowitz showed that he met every requirement for jury service except, in practice, his race. When Attorney General Thomas Knight cross-examined him, he kept calling the witness "John". Leibowitz twice asked the court to make him stop. When Knight did not, Leibowitz jumped to his feet and told him to call the witness "mister", causing gasps in the gallery before the judge cut him off. According to PBS, this request that the prosecution address a Black man as "Mr. Sandford" was among the things that most angered local opinion.
He paid a price for his stand. Leibowitz's insistence on equal respect, together with his tough cross-examination of the main accuser, made him deeply unpopular in northern Alabama, and he needed National Guard protection during the trial. Yet he kept building the record on jury exclusion, later using a handwriting expert to show that names of Black citizens had been added to a county jury roll after the fact.
That record won the landmark 1935 Supreme Court ruling in Norris v. Alabama, which held that excluding citizens from juries because of their race violated the Constitution. Alabama's governor then told the state's judges and prosecutors that Black citizens must be placed in jury boxes.
Why it matters
Leibowitz's public demand for courtesy challenged the everyday humiliations of segregation inside an Alabama courtroom, and the jury record he built helped open juries to Black citizens.
About Samuel Leibowitz
Romanian-born New York trial lawyer who defended the Scottsboro Boys without pay and won the Supreme Court ruling that barred the exclusion of Black citizens from juries.
More about Samuel Leibowitz
- Samuel Leibowitz defied death threats to defend his clientsThreatened with death in Decatur, Alabama, and guarded by the National Guard, Samuel Leibowitz vowed to defend the Scottsboro Boys "until hell freezes over".
- Samuel Leibowitz became a judge who took on organised crimeElected a Brooklyn judge in 1940, Samuel Leibowitz served nearly three decades on the bench, hearing gang and organised crime cases and rooting out corrupt officials.
- Samuel Leibowitz saved a mentally ill man from executionIn 1937 Samuel Leibowitz defended Robert Irwin, a former mental patient accused of triple murder, and negotiated a plea that spared him the death penalty.
- Samuel Leibowitz defended the Scottsboro Boys without a feeSamuel Leibowitz defended the Scottsboro Boys without a fee and won Norris v. Alabama, the 1935 ruling that Alabama's exclusion of Black jurors was unconstitutional.
- Samuel Leibowitz defended "the basic rights of man"Samuel Leibowitz, who did not share the politics of the group that hired him, took the Scottsboro case to defend "the basic rights of man" after reading the trial record.
Sources
- Scottsboro Defense Attorney: Samuel Leibowitz PBS American Experience
- Samuel Leibowitz Wikipedia
- Scottsboro Boys Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.