By Michael Munk, The Portland Alliance, February 2001

The recent screening of "Scottsboro: An American Tragedy" in Portland to mark Martin Luther King Day and Black History Month recalls the most significant struggle against racism of the 1930s. In Oregon, the worldwide cause of the "Nine Innocent Scottsboro Boys" in Alabama was prominently linked to the now-forgotten campaign to save Klamath Falls resident Theodore Jordan from hanging at the state penitentiary in Salem.  And the locale of  "Jordan Must Not Hang" struggle could not have more dramatically different from Scottsboro: Scottsboro was near the "Black Belt" where majority Blacks were viciously suppressed by a dominant minority of whites; Klamath Falls was a rural town in a state which counted only 2,200 Blacks among its almost one million residents in 1930. Indeed, Portland remains among the "whitest" cities in the nation. In the early years of the century, there were so few Black people in the city that real estate agents didn't even bother to redline a formal ghetto.

The International Labor Defense, which organized and fought both cases, called Klamath Falls "Oregon's Scottsboro" and the parallels between Jordan and the cause celebre in Alabama are numerous. Both focused public attention on the racist nature of the criminal justice system long before today's discovery of "racial profiling." The nine framed Black victims of Scottsboro were sentenced to death for the rape of two white women in 1931, while Jordan's death sentence for murder came a year later, but all the victims were eventually saved by simultaneous legal defense and public campaigns organized by the Communist party and the ILD. In both cases that political effort was enough to cause a cautious NAACP to drop both causes and denounce the victims as tools of the reds. Finally, in both cases, the struggle saved the 10 threatened Black lives but did not prevent their serving many years in harsh prisons. The last Scottsboro "boy" prisoner (by then 34) finally escaped from a chain gang in 1946 and Alabama did not pardon the last survivor until George Wallace himself signed the order in 1976. Jordan was not paroled until 1960 after serving 26 years and died in Portland seven years later at the age of 62.

Theodore Jordan was a smart and articulate former railroad and hotel worker who moved from California to Klamath Falls in 1932, when he was 24. Evidently a loose and feisty young man who was not intimidated by racist whites, he found a personal enemy in Bill Chandler, a white Southern Pacific detective, whose nephew he had beaten out for a railroad job in Dunsmuir. Chandler managed to get him sent to San Quentin for a year and again, soon after he arrived in K-Falls, was responsible for his conviction on charges arising from a "skirmish" at a party where that nephew was present. Jordan spent the next four years in the Oregon State pen. And less than a month after his return to K-Falls, Chandler arrested Jordan again, this time on murder charges, for which he received a death sentence in Klamath circuit court. As in Scottsboro, a 1000- member lynch mob surrounded the Klamath County courthouse and dispersed only after Jordan's legal execution was ordered.

A white SP dining car steward had been found badly beaten while the diner sat on a K-Falls siding and died several months later. Immediately after the injured man was found, Chandler fingered Jordan and, Jordan charged, tortured a false confession from him. He, like the Scottsboro boys, had no real defense attorney and was convicted by an all white jury who heard many racist comments during the trial. Also like the Scottsboro case, only after his death sentence did the NAACP hire Portland attorney Charles W. Robison to file an appeal for a stay of execution and a new trial.

At this point, Jordan agreed to have the ILD, led in Oregon by attorney Irvin Goodman, supported by future federal judge Gus Solomon, Leo Levinson and a Mr. Seltzer, represent him and generate public support. Robison immediately dropped him because the "NAACP can in no way be aligned with Communism." But he also went to denounce Jordan as "too smart for your own good and too ignorant for anyone else's good" and accused him of being "a curse and not a help to your own people." That caused Roy Wilkins, then Assistant National Secretary of the NAACP, to declare his organization would not cooperate with the ILD--which was precisely the NAACP's position in the Scottsboro case. Jordan chose the ILD and, while Goodman was able to persuade only two judges of the Oregon Supreme Court to back a new trial, the campaign succeeded in saving his life when Gov. Julius Meier commuted Jordan's sentence in 1934. Petitions to the Governor from ILD chapters across the state from Astoria to Errol Heights (upper Woodstock) had charged his trial was a legal lynching and demanded his release. Millions around the world signed similar petitions on behalf of the Scottsboro boys. The US Supreme Court twice ordered new trials for them and all but one were paroled by 1943. Jordan, however, was not paroled for another 17 years.

Jordan's death row letters, intercepted by the Portland police Red squad and available in its files at the Portland City Archives, reveal an lively young man with a sense of humor, actively involved in the details of his case (and interested in the young women the campaign brought him into contact with.). Here's an example from a letter to "Belle," sent by the ILD to Portland to manage his campaign:

"I just took another small work-out on the piano here and goodness knows I am feeling like two million bucks even if it's in shekels or kopecks. Some day I may whip up a few hot numbers for you, provided you can stand it without calling the riot squad. Even if I do say so myself, I seem to run Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington a very close second when it come to spanking the ivories. I plunk 'em mean, or let 'em alone--that's Mrs. George's [his mother] boy as I live and breathe."

While reluctant to credit the Communist party and the ILD for saving the lives of the Scottsboro victims, the film shown at the Northwest Film Center on MLK Day clearly documents the case and concludes that Scottsboro, for the first time in the US, made "Black and White, Unite and Fight"  a mass movement, and set the stage for the postwar civil rights movement  the January 15 national holiday commemorates. Oregon's "Scottsboro Case"  and Ted Jordan still await a similar testament.