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Scottsboro Case
6 articles on Scottsboro Case
Scottsboro Boys
Source: African American National Biography
Word Count: 4169 Includes: Further ReadingOlen Montgomery (1914–?), Clarence Norris (12 July 1912–23 Jan. 1989), Haywood Patterson (1913–24 Aug. 1952), Ozie Powell (1915–?), Willie Roberson (4 July 1916–c. 1959), Charlie Weems (1911–?), Eugene Williams (1918–?), Andrew “Andy” Wright, (1912–?), and Leroy “Roy” Wright (1918–1959), became an international cause célèbre after they were accused of raping two white women on a Southern Railroad freight train traveling on 25 March 1931 through northern Alabama en route to Memphis, Tennessee. Like many Depression-era Americans, the nine young men and the two women had been riding the rails in search of work. Shortly after their train crossed into Alabama, a white male hobo stepped on the hand of Haywood Patterson, who had been hanging on to one of the freight carriages. A scuffle ensued in ...
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Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature
Word Count: 421Nearly lynched, quickly tried and sentenced to death for supposedly raping two white women in a railroad car near Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931, the Scottsboro boys symbolized, in literature, law, and the minds of many, the desperate situation of southern African American men. Several writers, including Countee Cullen and S. Ralph Harlow, wrote in response to this incident, but none more significantly than Langston Hughes.In his small volume, Scottsboro Limited (1932), Hughes presented this case as an exemplar of larger ethical, moral, and economic issues. In “Justice,” Hughes gives infected eyes to the blind Justice of U.S. jurisprudence, reshaping a foundational figure of impartiality and reasoned judgment as an image of physical and ethical decay. In “Christ in Alabama,” he casts violent and sexual overtones over the relation of a light-skinned God to a darker-skinned Mary, ...
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Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
The collective name “Scottsboro Boys” was given to nine African American males ranging from thirteen to nineteen years of age when they were arrested in Paint Rock, Alabama, in March 1931 for allegedly assaulting Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, two white Huntsville mill workers, on a Southern Railroad freight train going from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Memphis via Alabama. Charges of rape were added after the young men were taken to Scottsboro, the Jackson County seat. News of the incident spread, and a lynch mob gathered at the jail where the youths were being held. The governor of Alabama, B. M. Miller, activated the National Guard to prevent a lynching.For Communists, what became known as the Scottsboro case was an example of injustice resulting from class oppression, and the International Labor Defense ...
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Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 1540 Includes: BibliographyInternational cause célèbre during the 1930s, in which nine young black men were accused of raping two white women in Alabama. The Scottsboro case began in 1931 when two white women, Victoria Bates and Ruby Price, falsely accused nine young African Americans of rape. Throughout the world in the 1930s, the Scottsboro defendants came to symbolize the racism and injustice of the American South. In their initial trials the defendants received what critics described as a “legal lynching.” But the assistance of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) gave the young men a second chance, and the ensuing struggle became one of the great civil rights cases of the twentieth century.After several retrials, worldwide protests, massive publicity, and two landmark rulings by the Supreme Court of the United States, only four ...
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Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 407The Scottsboro Case, a cause célèbre in modern American race relations, began in April of 1931 with a brawl between whites and blacks riding a freight train through northern Alabama. When Jackson County officials stopped the train near Scottsboro, two white women—Victoria Price and Ruby Bates—accused nine black teenagers of raping them.A Scottsboro jury quickly convicted eight of the nine boys and sentenced them to death. The U.S. Communist party took up the case, mobilizing mass protests across America and in Europe and mounting an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. In Powell v. Alabama (1932), the Supreme Court ordered a new trial on the grounds that defendants in capital cases were entitled to more than a pro forma defense. (The two attorneys for the nine youths had been given less than thirty minutes to prepare ...
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Source: The Oxford Companion to American Law
Word Count: 588The series of legal proceedings associated with alleged rapes on a train near Scottsboro, Alabama, marks the collision between sexualized racial violence and due process of law and civil rights. At the end of the nineteenth century, white fears of African-American sexuality led to increasingly brutal racial violence (see race and ethnicity). White mobs tortured to death thousands of African-American men and justified their violence as made necessary by an alleged tendency toward sexual violence on the part of African-American men. When whites did not torture African-American males to death in the street, they subjected them to kangaroo courts where jurors dared not defy the mob outside, or inside, the courtroom.The Scottsboro case began on March 25, 1931when a young woman named Ruby BatesAt ...
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