Biography
Lester Carter was a white witness detained in Scottsboro during the 1931 prosecution of nine Black youths. In James S. Allen’s Organizing in the Depression South (published 2001, preface dated January 1984), Allen recounts Carter’s 1933 defense testimony: after the freight-train fight and a car trip to Paint Rock, authorities held him in Scottsboro jail for sixteen days as a witness for the state, but did not call him at the original trial. Carter later became a defense witness, contradicting the alleged rape account and describing conversations he overheard in custody. Sixteen days is the reported actual witness detention; the memoir does not state his exact physical release day. His separate earlier fifty-day road-gang sentence is not added as a political-custody case. Source: https://www.marxists.org/archive/allen/organizing-south.pdf#page=122
His first-person December 1933 Labor Defender installment describes actual Scottsboro jail confinement with the other white train witnesses. He says they were questioned, placed in the run-around and then locked inside the cage for the night; they spent the next day there and were later kept in a courthouse waiting room without hearing the testimony. He names fellow detainees Odell Gladwell, called Texas Slim, his brother Lindsay Gladwell, John Ferguson and John Gleason of Georgia. Carter recounts Odell’s confinement in a dungeon too small to sit or lie down and the boys forcing its door open with a mop handle. These details supplement the separately reported sixteen days without inventing exact release endpoints. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/labordefender/1933/v09n11-dec-1933-lab-def.pdf#page=19
Sources
In his signed autobiographical account Carter says he was born May 16, 1911 in Mineral Wells, Texas. He describes his father as a highway-construction superintendent, his mother dying while the children were small, finishing grammar school and leaving in his first high-school year, and leaving home at fourteen with Earl Black for St. Louis. His portrait accompanies the account. The later tour itinerary with Mrs. Janie Patterson and Richard B. Moore is prospective and supplies no new custody event.
