SCOTTSBORO TRIALS

The Scottsboro Trials are the Trials faced by nine young African American men accused of rapping two white women

Southern Railroad's Chattanooga to Memphis freight ,March 25, 1931
During 1931 the Great Depression was still going strong so it wasn't unlikely for people to be riding the rails and looking for work

While crossing the Alabama border a white boy stepped on he hand of a African American boy which resulted in a fight between the white youths and the African American youths aboard the train, ultimately resulting with the African Americans winning. When the train came to a stopped armed men swarmed the train and arrested as many African Americans as they could get , they successfully captured nine boys who would soon be known as the "scottsboro boys"

The Scottsboro boys where then taken to jail in scottsboro giving them the name. Two white girls, mill workers from Huntsville, told someone of authority that they had been rapped by 12 armed black men, one girl pointed out 6 of the boro boys as the ones that rapped her and it was assumed that the others took the other girl.

TRIAL

• 12 days after the arrest a completely white jury sentenced 8 of the boys to death and the last, being only 13 years old, was sentenced to life in prison

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• The NAACP expectedly would have come to the Scottsboro boys side but instead ignored the case because of the possible repricussions if any of the boys where actually guilty
• The communist party were the ones who actually came to the boys defense

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• The trail then lost in a 6-1 Supreme Court vote reconfirmed all but on of the boys to be scentenced to death
• The cases were appealed to the United States Supreme Court which overturned the convictions in the landmark case of Powell vs Alabama.

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• The Court, 7 - 2, ruled that the right of the defendants under the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause to competent legal counsel had been denied by Alabama.
• There would have to be new trials.

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• The Scottsboro Boys spent the two years between their first trials and the second round in the deplorable conditions of Depression-era Alabama prisons.
• They sat on death row never knowing when they're time was going to come staying in tliving conditions illegal conditions for white men to stay in

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• The second trial of Haywood Patterson opened on March 30, 1933

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• In the next rail there was a much more diverse jury and the boys had actual defense lawyers.
• After cross examination of the girls story's proved that they where lying and had themselves broken laws and tried to accuse others to cover up they're own guilt

Even after being proved that the girls where indeed lying the boys where guilty and scentenced to the same fate

As time went on the boys got separated from each other and had many more Trials , some where sentenced to death, some died in jail in between Trials

Nearly 82 years after the Initial arrest, the three remaining Scottsboro boys who had dent been killed after the initial arrest
Where cleared of all charges by the state of Alabama

CITATION

• http://www.blackpast.org/aah/scottsboro-boys-trial-and-defense-campaign-193...
• https://www.thenation.com/article/week-nation-history-pardoning-scottsboro-...

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