A revealing portrait of Judge James E. Horton Jr., whose quiet moral courage reshaped one of the most explosive legal battles in American history.

A Man Visited by History illuminates what author Steven P. Brown calls the “last major Scottsboro trials–related subject to have eluded careful study”: the life of Judge James E. Horton Jr., the white Alabama Eighth Circuit judge who set aside an all-white jury’s guilty verdict and death sentence in the second trial of African American defendant Haywood Patterson. Of the three trial judges and more than one hundred jurors who considered the cases of the Scottsboro defendants, Horton was the only one to find that the evidence against them was virtually nonexistent. Horton was then removed from further involvement with the cases and, despite being on the fast track to political prominence before the 1933 retrial of the Scottsboro defendants, was defeated for reelection as circuit judge in 1934. His ruling in the Patterson case impacted the Scottsboro defendants’ lives and continues to affect their legacies today. 

Brown researched largely untapped resources that, for the first time, illuminate who Horton was before the Scottsboro trials, what he faced presiding over Patterson’s case, the factors that led him to overturn the jury’s verdict, and his later life raising award-winning cattle. What emerges is a remarkably consistent picture of a man who, Brown argues, for more than ninety years, sought nothing more than to do what he thought was right. Historians of the South, the early twentieth century, the law, and race relations as well as general readers will find this intimate account of the judge in the infamous trials to be riveting and instructive.
 

Steven P. Brown is Morris Savage Endowed Chair and professor of political science at Auburn University. He is the author of Alabama Justice: The Cases and Faces That Changed a Nation, John McKinley and the Antebellum Supreme Court: Circuit Riding in the Old Southwest, and Trumping Religion: The New Christian Right, the Free Speech Clause, and the Courts.