Biography of scottsboro boys
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Who Were the Scottsboro Boys?
By the early 1930s, with the nation mired in the Great Depression, many unemployed Americans would try and 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. But 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 the Jim Crow 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.
Initial Trials and Appeals (1931-32)
In the first set of trials in April 1931, an all-white, all-male jury quickly convicted the Scottsboro Boys and sentenced eight of them to death.
The trial of the youngest,
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The case of nine young African American men accused of the rape of two white women in the town of Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931, was a milestone in the emergence of a national civil rights movement. It was also an important milestone for the rights of criminal defendants, establishing for the first time that defendants facing the death penalty are constitutionally entitled to appointed counsel if they cannot afford one, and that the right to counsel includes the right to effective representation.
With angry white mobs milling outside a courthouse deep in the Jim Crow South, justice was skewed from day one of the trial. The so-called 'Scottsboro boys' – ranging in age from 12 to 19 – were entitled to an attorney under Alabama law because the charges carried a death sentence, but none came forward until the morning of trial, which occurred six days after the arraignment. Two attorneys then offered to represent the defendants for the first time – a Tennessee real estate lawyer unfamiliar with the Alabama courts and a local attorney who had not appeared before a jury in decades. Neither was adequately prepared to defend their young clients, and, as they admitted to the judge, had barely met or spoken with them before the trial began.
Not surprisingly, the all-white, all-male ju
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