Scottsboro Trials

In 1931, nine young African-American men were accused of raping two white women in northern Alabama while traveling on a train from Chattanooga to Memphis, Tennessee. The young men—Olen Montgomery, Clarence Norris, Haywood Patterson, Ozie Powell, Willie Roberson, Charlie Weems, Eugene Williams, Andy Wright, and Roy Wright—were innocent. Saved from a mob lynching, they nonetheless endured a series of unfair trials over seven years; eight received death sentences. (Roy Wright, just turned thirteen, was held in limbo until 1937 because of his youth.) Embraced by the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) as well as a broad collection of left-wing organizations and artists, the fight for the young men’s lives became an international movement. Their defense was eventually paid for by the CPUSA and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and taken on by Samuel Liebowitz, a celebrated criminal attorney whose Judaism invited vicious anti-Semitism from white southerners. Their case led to two landmark Supreme Court case rulings regarding due process and equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment: Powell v. Alabama (1932) reversed the defendants’ convictions based on inadequate counsel, while Norris v. Alabama (1935) established that officials in Alabama had violated the defendants’ constitutional rights by excluding black Alabamans from juries. Over the course of the trials, the two accusers—Ruby Bates and Victoria Price—were celebrated as the epitome of southern white womanhood and then maligned as lying “white trash” harlots. That Bates later recanted and campaigned for the defendants’ freedom did little to earn her full personhood in the received history. The “Scottsboro Boys” spent years, some more than a decade, in America’s worst prisons and suffered physical and psychological damage that would prove irreparable. Five of the defendants were released when the prosecution chose not to proceed with their cases in 1937, though this nolle prosequi decision was not an acquittal, exoneration, or apology. The last to remain in jail, Andy Wright, was released in 1950. Alabama Governor George Wallace pardoned the last living Scottsboro defendant, Clarence Norris, in 1976. Finally, in April 2013, Alabama changed its law to allow posthumous pardons, and the remaining three defendants were officially pardoned that November. The Scottsboro case is a crucial part of the histories of African Americans, the US South, race and gender in the 20th-century United States, the transnational modern civil rights and labor movements, the Great Depression, and the US justice system.