Oklahoma State University – Oklahoma City
Civil Rights and Liberties - POLS 1320
Winter 2022
Lecture Notes Twelve
Contents: Historical perspective of the Scottsboro Boys
Lecture Notes Twelve
The Scottsboro Boys were nine black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women aboard a
train near Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931. The trials and repeated retrials of the Scottsboro Boys sparked
an international uproar and produced two landmark U.S. Supreme Court verdicts, even as the
defendants were forced to spend years battling the courts and enduring the harsh conditions of the
Alabama prison system.
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, 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.
The International Labor Defense (ILD), spearheaded a national campaign to help free the nine young
men, including rallies, speeches, parades and demonstrations. Letters streamed in from people—
Communists and non-Communists, white and black—protesting the guilty verdicts.
But in March 1932, the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the convictions of seven of the defendants; it
granted Williams a new trial, as he was a minor at the time of his conviction.
n 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 African Americans to adequate counsel, and remanded the cases to the lower courts.
