Scottsboro Boys

Known as the Scottsboro Boys, nine male youths of African American descent, ages twelve to twenty, were accused of raping two white girls on a freight train traveling through Alabama in 1931. The trials over this case addressed the problem of racism in the United States judiciary and, in the longer term, contributed to the end of "all-white" juries.

On March 25, 1931, a conflict between several white and nine black hobos occurred on a Southern Railway freight train between Chattanooga and Memphis, Tennessee. The whites were forced off the train and complained to the police. Blacks Olen Montgomery (17), Clarence Norris (19), Haywood Patterson (18), Ozie Powell (16), Willie Roberson (16), Charlie Weems (16), Eugene Williams (13), and brothers Andy (19) and Roy Wright (12 or 13) were arrested for assault in Paint Rock, Alabama. Two white girls remaining on the train, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, subsequently testified that they had been raped by the blacks.

A lynch mob initially formed in Scottsboro, Alabama, where the arrestees were awaiting trial; however, the situation was calmed. Two weeks after the alleged crime, eight of the nine defendants were found guilty by a Scottsboro court in summary, one-day trials and sentenced to the death penalty - at the time the usual penalty in rape trials involving black perpetrators and white victims.

However, the youthful age of the perpetrators, the severity of the sentences, and serious procedural deficiencies led organizations such as the American Communist Party and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to speak out and denounce the injustice and racist nature of the trials in question. International Labor Defense, an apron organization of the Communist Party, took over the defense of the defendants. A series of subsequent trials ensued, some of a fundamental nature. In 1932, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the judgments of the First Circuit on the ground that the convicts had been restricted in their right to a fair trial (Powell v. Alabama, 287 U.S. 45).

In 1933, a second series of trials took place in Decatur, Alabama. The verdicts of the all-white juries were the same as those of 1931, and they were again overturned by the Supreme Court in 1935 (Norris v. Alabama, 294 U.S. 587). In a third series of trials, defendant Clarence Norris again received the death penalty, and three of the other defendants received prison sentences ranging from 75 to 99 years. Alabama Governor David Bibb Graves commuted Norris' death sentence to life in prison in 1938. He was pardoned by Governor George Wallace in 1976. The other defendants had already been released in the 1940s and 1950s. In 2013, another three of them were posthumously pardoned.