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Jul 27, 2023 · A Right to Read: Segregation and Civil Rights in Alabama’s Public Libraries, 1900-1965. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Morgan, Martha, and Neal Hutchens. 2001. “The Tangled Web of Alabama’s Equality Doctrine After Melof: Historical Reflections on Equal Protection and the Alabama Constitution.” Alabama Law Review 53: 135-242.
- Who Were The Scottsboro Boys?
- Initial Trials and Appeals
- Powell v. Alabama
- Norris v. Alabama
- Scottsboro Boys Legacy
- Harper Lee
- Sources
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...
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, 13-year-old Leroy Wright, ended in a hung jury when one juror favored life imprisonment rather than death. A mistrial was declared, and Leroy Wright would remain in prison until...
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 co...
In January 1935, the Supreme Court again overturned the guilty verdicts, ruling in Norris v. Alabamathat 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 in...
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 Michigangovernor refused Alabama’s efforts to extradite him. Convicted of manslaughter after a barroom brawl in 1951, Patters...
Author Harper Lee reportedly drew on the boys’ experience when she wrote her classic novel To Kill A Mockingbird, and over the years the case has inspired numerous other books, songs, feature films, documentaries and even a Broadway musical. Clarence Norris, who received a pardon from Governor George Wallaceof Alabama in 1976, would outlive all of ...
Daren Salter, Scottsboro Trials, Encyclopedia of Alabama. Scottsboro: An American Tragedy, PBS. History, Scottsboro Boys Museum. Alan Blinder, “Alabama Pardons 3 ‘Scottsboro Boys’ After 80 Years,” New York Times, November 21, 2013.
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Sep 5, 2024 · Scottsboro case, major U.S. civil rights controversy of the 1930s surrounding the prosecution in Scottsboro, Alabama, of nine Black youths falsely accused of raping two white women. The nine, after nearly being lynched, were brought to trial in Scottsboro in April 1931, just three weeks after their arrests. Not until the first day of the trial were the defendants provided with the services of ...
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Previous Section Labor Unions During the Great Depression and New Deal; Next Section World War II; Race Relations in the 1930s and 1940s Negro and White Man Sitting on Curb, Oklahoma, 1939. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives. The problems of the Great Depression affected virtually every group of ...
This chapter considers the impact of war on southern communities. Because the lived experience of the Alabama countryside was intensely local, few of the changes in national government actually affected their daily lives. Conditions at the local level witnessed little, if any, change prompted by the new national discussion on citizenship and ...
Alabama was the site of many key events in the American civil rights movement. Rosa Parks's stand against segregation on a public bus led to the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the violence targeted toward the Freedom Riders of the early 1960s drew the nation's attention to racial hatred in Alabama. Protests led by Rev. Martin Luther King ...
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Two weeks ago, I re-read Harper Lee’s haunting 1960 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. One week ago, I once again saw the film version of the book, with Gregory Peck in his Oscar-winning performance ...
