House of Scottsboro Boys judge may move to Decatur
Nov. 3—The rural Limestone County house that belonged to Judge James Horton could be moved to Decatur, the city where he ruled against racial injustice in 1933 in one of the Scottsboro Boys trials.
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Decatur artist Frances Tate said the Celebrating Early Old Town with Art organization that she founded would like to move the house from its current Greenbrier location. It would be relocated to Decatur's old town community and turned into a legal learning center for pre-law students, criminal justice students, history students and religion students.
"We're going to bring those students in to learn legal ethics, law history and discuss, of course, the Scottsboro Boys cases, the Scottsboro Boys trials, the other cases that have happened here in Decatur ... just national cases, period."
Two of Horton's granddaughters, Susan Faulkner and Jenny Horton, said they are willing to donate the house to CEOTA. According to Faulkner, Greenbrier is becoming industrialized and was no longer a suitable place for the home.
Faulkner said she started researching historical associations that might be interested in the home because the family did not want to tear it down. She ended up in contact with CEOTA, which is developing a civil rights museum in a house at 818 Sycamore St. N.W. in Decatur where one of the Scottsboro Boys accusers is believed to have stayed during one of the Scottsboro Boys trials.
"There are other possibilities, but this is the one we went to first," Faulkner said.
Estimates for relocating the house are still being solicited, and fundraising would be needed, Tate said.
Tate said it will be complex to move such a large structure, so it must be coordinated with the Alabama Department of Transportation and local utilities. "When you fool with other entities, there's a process you have to go through," she said.
In the first stage of the move, the house would be parked on a road near Calhoun Community College until about 3 a.m. when traffic flow has dwindled. The house would be moved across the Tennessee River bridge to Decatur. Roads would have to be closed and traffic detoured during the move, and some utility poles might have be to moved due to the large size of the house.
House's history
The house has been moved before — the result of fallout from Horton's role in the Scottsboro Boys case.
The case had begun in 1931 when nine Black youths were arrested in Jackson County and falsely accused of raping two white women. They were indicted less than a week after their arrests and convicted less than a month after they were charged.
After the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the convictions because the defendants weren't given adequate counsel, the second trial of Haywood Patterson was held in Decatur with Horton, who lived in Athens, presiding.
Morgan County Archivist John Allison said Horton was a circuit judge and presided over cases in Athens and Decatur.
"Judge Horton was well known, he had a great reputation, known as being fair," Allison said. "He's probably the best person they could've gotten."
Despite one of the alleged victims testifying that their original allegations against the Scottsboro Boys were false and several witnesses providing conflicting testimony, the all-white jury convicted Patterson of rape and sentenced him to death in Alabama's electric chair.
Believing the defendants were indeed innocent and the alleged victims had lied, Horton set aside the verdict on June 22, 1933, in a decision he read at the Limestone County Courthouse, ordering a new trial for Patterson and indefinitely postponing trials for the rest, ruling they could not get a fair trial.
"Judge Horton, in later interviews, he said he realized something very wrong has happened here," said Allison. "It kills his political career. He knew this, that it would kill his political career. So, it was a very brave, personal move for him to make. He received a lot of death threats, a lot of hate mail. So, he kind of just retires from public life and becomes a farmer."
According to Allison, Horton lived by a Latin saying his mother always told him: Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.
After Horton set aside the verdict, he was removed from the case and lost his reelection bid a year later, never to serve on the bench again. So he decided to move his house from Athens. It had been completed in 1849 on what is now the corner of Hobbs Street and Marion Street, where Athens City Hall currently stands, according to Limestone County Archivist Rebekah Davis.
The house began to be moved from Athens, piece by piece, to its current location in Greenbrier, on about 2,000 acres of land, in 1938 and took two years to move, according to Kathy Horton Garrett, another of Horton's granddaughters.
Horton lived in the house at the Greenbrier location from 1940 until he died in 1973, Garrett said. On his land he raised black angus cattle and had row crops.
Anyone interested in donating to CEOTA for this project can visit www.sbcmuseum.org.
—erica.smith@decaturdaily.com or 256-340-2460.
