Historically speaking, the South had some of the best legal aid support in the nineteenth century. However by the nineteen-twenties and thirties, what you had was the practice of each state determining its own rules, and the South having weak legal aid organizations.
In the urban North and California, you had the beginning of modern Legal Aid offices. The practice that went on, of Judge Hawking appointing attorneys from the Bar, was not all that unusual, and the quality of criminal lawyers at that time was believed not that good. Also, what the court stated is that a defendant should have good counsel in capital cases.
When we look at these decisions directed toward the South, it is one thing for the court to say this, and another for it to implement the decision. Thus, hostility developed between the Southern judiciary, and the Supreme Court. It is not all that clear what affect it had on local Southern cases, since not all of the cases reach the Supreme Court, and the NAACP and IDF could not handle every case.
Finally, there had been an American Civil Liberties Union report that both victims were prostitutes and lived in the Black part of town. The fact that their clients were universal was never published by the Southern newspapers because it was inconsistent with the cultural Southern notions that dedicated that era.
This went along with the feeling in the South that Blacks were less passive and more incline to violent or aggressive. This was further enhanced by a sense of hostility by the Supreme Court and the Northerners, the idea that the communists were in the South to organize the Blacks and laborers, and the general hostility towards the union tradition.
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