Harle Grady Bailey

Who was Harle Grady Bailey?

H. G. Bailey graduated from the University of Georgia in 1909. Then attended Mercer University Law School. After passing the Bar, he became a "Bank Examiner" for a few years covering Georgia and Florida. Then after marrying Floy Alma Smith, they moved to Boaz, Alabama where he practiced Law until the 1960s.

They produced three children: Harle Grady Bailey junior, James Tryon Bailey, and Sara Francis Bailey-Strawn.

During the 1930s, and 1940s, he was "Circuit Solicitor" of a four county area of NE Alabama (Marshall, Dekalb, Cherokee, and Jackson).

He was the prosecuting Attorney in the first "Scottsboro Boys Trial" held in Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931, and consulted in the later trials and appeals.

"The Scottsboro Trials were among the most 'infamous' episodes of legal 'injustice' in the Jim Crow South. The events that culminated in the trials began in the early spring of 1931, when nine young black men were accused of raping two white women on a train. The cases were tried and appealed in Alabama and twice argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. Despite evidence that exonerated the accused and even a retraction by one of the accusers, the state pursued the case and all-white juries delivered guilty verdicts that initially carried the death penalty. Several of the accused were sentenced to prison terms and all endured long stays in prison as the case made its way through the legal system. The case later served as one of the inspirations for Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird."

(Daren Salter, Univ. of Washington)

In the 1950s, he went back in to private practice of law, in Boaz, and retired in 1960.

He died from the effects of prostate cancer in 1968, and is buried in Hillcrest Cemetary in Boaz.