Scottsboro Trial
1st hour
Outcomes
It was early spring on March 25th 1931 that nine boys had allegedly rapped to white girls. This was during the time of the Great Depression and everyone was out of work. So to get to other towns to look for work whites, blacks, men, and women hitched a free ride on the slow moving oil tankers and gondola freight cars. This way they could go to another town down the line to look for work. A fight broke out between young blacks and whites while the train had stopped to get water. The fight ended with the whites being thrown off of the train. Little did the blacks know the white boys went to the station mater and told him that they had rapped two white girls (Victoria Price and Ruby Bates). The stationmaster telegraphed ahead to Scottsboro Alabama a town eighteen miles ahead. To have the train stopped but the train had already passed there so Paint Rock, Alabama about twenty miles further was notified by telegraph.
News of the incident spread quickly. The Jackson County Sentinel printed that evening describing the “revolting crime” white outrage erupted over the allegations and a lynch mob gathered outside of the Scottsboro jail. Governor Miller had to call the National Guard to protect the jail and prisoners. NAACP and International Labor Defense (ILD) raised money in their defense. Twenty indictments were handed down on March 30th in Scottsboro. All nine( Haywood Patterson, Clarence Norris, Charles Weems, Ozzie Powell, Andrew Wright, Leroy Wright , Eugene Williams, Willie Roberson, and Olin Montgomery) pleaded not guilty. Rape was punishable by death in 1931. But instead the people in Scottsboro held a trail. It lasted six years and resulted in two Supreme Court rulings. Their trails began on April 6th and were completed in three days. Eight were sentenced to death in the electric chair on July 10th and the ninth life imprisonment. A second trail opened in Decatur, Alabama. On March 28, 1933 following the filing of two defense motions for a change in revenue and to quash the indictment against the boys on the grounds there had not been any blacks on the jury. At this time Eugene Miller was only a minor and he was given 99 years because of his age.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the defendants were denied the right to counsel. Which violated their right due to the process under the 14th amendment. In 1932 the police arrested Ruby Bates on charges that had nothing to do with the case. When they found a letter that she had written to her boyfriend saying that she wasn’t raped. The man that was carrying the letter told them that ILD had gotten her drunk and had her write the letter. Around 1933 she testified in Haywood Patterson case and said that there was never any rape and the things that Price had spoken about was from the night before when they were with their boyfriends. These charges were dropped for the final 4 Eugene Williams, Olin Montgomery, Willie Roberson, and Leroy Wright. Charlie Weems was the 1st to be paroled in 1943 then Norris and Andy Wright. About 2 months later Powell too. Andy and Wright were reimprisoned for parole violations. Clarence Norris lived the longest. His sentenced was commuted in 1938 and was paroled in 1946. 30 years later the Governor of Alabama admitted that the Scottsboro trail was unfair and Norris was pardoned. He was the only Scottsboro boy still alive.
Melia R.
- Scottsboro Trail: Southern Ideals
On March 25,1931 two white girls, Victoria Price, 21 and Ruby Bates, 17, got on a train headed back to a small town in Madison County. On the train the girls meet a group of white boys and where later joined by what Victoria said were twelve Negro boys. In Victoria’s words, the Negroes began to fight with the white boys and throw them off the train, later investigation found out that when the white boys got off the train they told the station master that there were a group of Negroes and two white girls on the train. Victoria said that as the ride went on that six Negroes raped her and six raped Ruby and as they rode on three of them got off the train. Facts show that when the train arrived at the next station the nine remaining boys were arrested, put in jail and convicted with no evidence against them, the girls didn’t even press charges until they were in custody themselves.
Racial fears of sexual abuse with black men and white women were common at that time. If you were charged with the rape or even looking at a white woman it often led to you getting lynched. Lynching reached its peak around the 1900 and the first two decades of the twentieth century. Southern racism had an effect on this case; they had already tried to give eight of the boys the death sentences. When authorities asked Ruby how many boys entered the train she said that she was too frightened to count. Authorities involved in the trails thought that Ruby was stupid and slow, but Victoria was a smart one because she had the testimony that would get this case moving and the Negroes sentenced to death. She had the testimony the wanted to hear.
Further into the case, newspaper reports started to say that the Negroes allowed one boy to stay and witness the assault. There was evidence that showed that the boys were innocent no one cared because they were black boys and they shouldn’t have been seen with the white girls anyway. The First lawyer the boys had was a volunteer lawyer, he didn’t try their trail like a lawyer was suppose to and he made a complete mockery of the whole case. Their next lawyer’s name was Samuel S. Leibowitz Esq., he found the evidence that proved them innocent but another reason was because he was from the North and the people in the south didn’t like people from the North. This is how Southern ideals, once again, prolonged the Scottsboro Trail.
Brittany S.
The Scottsboro Boys**
The Depression year of 1931. For some riding around was an appealing thing to do compared to the violence and smoking of their early lives. Others hopped trail cars to move from one useless job search to the next. Exactly 12 males or so mainly male--and mainly young blacks rode the Southern Railroad's from Chattanooga to Memphis, Tennessee on March 25, 1931. Among them were four black Chattanooga teenagers known as some of the scottsboro boys hoping to investigate a rumor of government jobs in Memphis hauling logs on the river and five other black teens from various parts of Georgia. Four young whites, two males and two females dressed in overalls, also rode the train, returning to Huntsville from unsuccessful job searches in the cotton mills of Chattanooga.
Soon after the train crossed the Alabama border, a white youth walked across the top of a train car. He stepped on the hand of a black person named Haywood Patterson, who was hanging on to its side. Patterson had a couple of friends aboard the train. A hard punching fight erupted between white girls and a large group of black boys known as the scottsboro boys. Eventually the blacks succeeded in forcing all but one of the members of the white gang off the train. Patterson pulled the one white kwon as orville gilley who got back onto the train after it had got faster to a almost turbo speed. Some of the white people forced off the train went to the station in Stevenson. To report what they throught as an assault by a group of black men. The stationmaster went ahead. A group of men in Paint Rock, Alabama stopped the train. 12 men with guns rushed the train as it ground to a halt. The armed men rounded up every black male they could find. Nine captured black men, soon to be called the scottsboro boys were tied together with plow line, loaded on a flatback truck, and taken to a jail in Scottsboro.
Also greeted by the posse in Paint Rock were two mill workers from Huntsville, Victoria price, and Ruby Bates One or the other of the girls, either in response to a question or on their own initiative, told one of the gang members that they had been raped by a gang of 12 black men with pistols and knives. In the jail that March 25th, Price pointed out 6 of the 9 boys and said that they were the ones who raped her and her friend. The guard reportedly replied, "If those 6 had Miss Price, it stands to reason that the others had Miss Bates." When one of the accused ,Clarence Norris , called the girls liars he was struck by a bayonet. A crowd of several men, hoping for a good old-fashioned lynching, surrounded the Scottsboro jail the night of their arrest for rape. Their plans were foiled, however, when Alabama's governor, B. M. Miller, ordered the National Guard to Scottsboro to protect the suspects.
D'andre T.
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.