Biography
Ruby Bates, a white textile worker and witness in the Scottsboro prosecution, described in her first-person Labor Defender memoir a coercive police detention at Huntsville, which the memoir dates to January 1933. After police found her letter telling Earl Streetman the rape accusation was false, officers came to her house and took her to the jail. She says the sheriff threatened one hundred days on a chain gang unless she signed an affidavit repudiating the letter; frightened, she signed without reading it. She later returned to Alabama and testified for the defense on April 7, 1933. This account documents an actual compelled jail interview and threatened punishment; it does not prove a hundred-day sentence was imposed or served, an overnight stay, an exact detention day or a complete custody total. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/labordefender/1934/v10n03-mar-1934-orig-LD.pdf#page=21 The year conflicts with her letter to Streetman, dated January 5, 1932, and the January 1932 wording quoted in her April 1933 trial testimony. No structured arrest year is selected from these conflicting chronologies. Additional primary sources: https://law2.umkc.edu/Faculty/projects/Ftrials/scottsboro/bates-streetman.html ; https://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scottsboro/Batestestimony.html
In the December 1933 installment of her first-person memoir, Bates describes a separate initial Scottsboro jail confinement in the 1931 prosecution. After the train seizure and a medical examination, she says authorities locked her and Victoria Price in a cell, where they slept on a three-inch mattress on concrete and remained until their grand-jury appearance; afterward they were taken to the white boys’ run-around. She describes Price threatening a long vagrancy sentence if she did not repeat the rape accusation. These are her retrospective allegations of actual witness restraint, distinct from the later Huntsville recantation-letter interrogation; the passage gives no exact discharge or completed duration. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/labordefender/1933/v09n11-dec-1933-lab-def.pdf#page=19
