Victoria Price - : "I didn't lie in Scottsboro. I didn't lie in Decatur and I ain't lied here. I've told the truth all the way through and I'm a' gonna go on fighting 'til my dying day or 'til justice is done. The posse sought the black teenagers who had thrown a group of white boys off the train. When the two white women said they had been raped by the black youths, the town, the women and the group of black young men and boys became part of the tragic episode in American history known as Scottsboro.
Price grew up in a poor part of Huntsville, Alabama and worked in local cotton mills, when there was work. During the Depression, the mills only employed Price and Bates for five or six days a month. On some of the other days, Price trespassed on the rails, travelling in search of work. She was just one of a vast army; at the height of the Depression, a quarter million jobless young people lived itinerant lives, moving from place to place by hopping trains.
Price had first gone to work as a spinner at age 10, alongside her mother, but after her mother suffered an injury, young Victoria earned all the money they had. Other neighbors reported that black men were among her patrons. When Victoria Price accused six of the nine boys of raping her, she was twenty-one years old, and had been married three times. According to Ruby Bates and Lester Carter, the white young man Bates had met a few days before, Price had been with her boyfriend, a married man named Jack Tiller, two nights before the ill-fated train ride.
On the witness stand, Carter testified he'd met Tiller and Price in Huntsville, where they were jailed for adultery and he had been locked up for vagrancy. Bates and Price spent the night, and had sex with Carter and Tiller, in a hobo jungle, a temporary camp near the tracks that was used by itinerants waiting for trains.
He proposed that Price made up the charge to protect herself and Bates. Leibowitz speculated that the young women feared they would be arrested for vagrancy or for being hobos in the company of the black youths. And he amassed a host of details in his witnesses' testimony to prove Price wasn't telling the truth. But Leibowitz was unable to depict Price as the lying, loose woman he believed her to be. An atmosphere of extreme hostility toward the Jewish New York lawyer and his witnesses had taken hold, so much so that a reporter in the courtroom heard more than one person say, "It'll be a wonder if Leibowitz gets out alive.
