1931
THE SCOTTSBORO BOYS
The Scottsboro Boys were nine Black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women aboard a train near Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931. The trials and repeated retrials of the Scottsboro Boys sparked an international uproar and produced two landmark U.S. Supreme Court verdicts, even as the defendants were forced to spend years battling the courts and enduring the harsh conditions of the Alabama prison system.
By the early 1930s, with the nation mired in the Great Depression, many unemployed Americans would try to hitch rides aboard freight trains to move around the country searching for work. On March 25, 1931, after a fight broke out on a Southern Railroad freight train in Jackson County, Alabama, police arrested nine Black youths, ranging in age from 13 to 19, on a minor charge. Passengers who had been on the train during the incident were questioned by the police, and when deputies questioned two white women, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, they accused the boys of raping them while onboard the train.
The nine teenagers—Charlie Weems, Ozie Powell, Clarence Norris, brothers Andrew and Leroy Wright, Olen Montgomery, Willie Roberson, Haywood Patterson, and Eugene Williams—were transferred to the local county seat, Scottsboro, to await trial.
Only four of them had known each other before their arrest. As news spread of the alleged rape (a highly inflammatory charge given racist attitudes and laws in the South), an angry white mob surrounded the jail, leading the local sheriff to call in the Alabama National Guard to prevent a lynching.
Alabama officials eventually agreed to let four of the convicted Scottsboro Boys—Weems, Andy Wright, Norris and Powell—out on parole.
After escaping from prison in 1948, Patterson was picked up in Detroit by the FBI, but the Michigan governor refused Alabama’s efforts to extradite him.
In November 1932, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Powell v. Alabama that the Scottsboro defendants had been denied the right to counsel, which violated their right to due process under the 14th Amendment.
The Supreme Court overturned the Alabama verdicts, setting an important legal precedent for enforcing the right of Black Americans to adequate counsel, and remanded the cases to the lower courts.
In January 1935, the Supreme Court again overturned the guilty verdicts, ruling in Norris v. Alabama that the systematic exclusion of Blacks on Jackson Country jury rolls denied a fair trial to the defendants, and suggesting that the lower courts review Patterson’s case as well.
This second landmark decision in the Scottsboro Boys case would help integrate future juries across the nation.
Clarence Norris, who received a pardon from Governor George Wallace of Alabama in 1976, would outlive all of the other Scottsboro Boys, dying in 1989 at the age of 76.
In 2013, the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles voted unanimously to issue posthumous pardons to Patterson, Weems, and Andy Wright, bringing a long-overdue end to one of the most notorious cases of racial injustice in U.S. history.
The trials of the Scottsboro Boys, the two Supreme Court verdicts they produced, and the international uproar over their treatment helped fuel the rise of the civil rights movement later in the 20th century and left a lasting imprint on the nation’s legal and cultural landscape.
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