#327 For Love of Trains- David Dante Troutt
The Patterson’s learned of a horrible event. Their 19 year
old son, Haywood had been falsely arrested for murder and rape aboard a train.
Him and 8 others were convicted and sentenced to death in an Alabama prison.
The family became hardened to the hopeless reality that faced their family.
“[He] became like a hopeless kind of iron, just thickening
and hardening under flames he couldn’t put out.”
After the ineptitude of the NAACP lawyer, they accepted the
help of a white, Jewish, communist group from New York. They won a stay of
execution and finally were able to see Haywood in person. He was beaten, and
desperate, but he was their son:
“They’d beaten him across the left side of his face, and his
eyes swole up. But when you looked deep into them there were the brown, tender
eyes of the boy.”
They won a Supreme Court appeal, but didn’t win the
re-trial. As the case continued to make its way back and forth, disaster
strikes again. Even without hope, you can still have fight, what else is there?
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