Scottsboro Boys
Under the name Scottsboro Boys , nine male youths of African American origin, aged twelve to twenty, were known who were accused in 1931 of raping two white girls on a freight train traveling through Alabama . The trials on this case addressed the issue of racism in the United States' judiciary and, in the longer term, contributed to the end of the “all-white” juries.
On March 25, 1931 there was a conflict between several white and nine black hobos on a freight train on the Southern Railway between Chattanooga and Memphis (Tennessee) . The whites were pushed off the train and complained to the police. The Black Oils Montgomery (17), Clarence Norris (19), Haywood Patterson (18), Ozie Powell (16), Willie Roberson (16), Charlie Weems (16), Eugene Williams (13), and the Andy brothers (19) ) and Roy Wright, 12 or 13, were arrested in Paint Rock, Alabama for assault. Two white girls remaining on the train, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, subsequently testified that they had been raped by the blacks.
In Scottsboro, Alabama , where the arrested were awaiting trial, a lynch mob initially formed , but the situation was calmed down. Two weeks after the alleged crime, eight of the nine defendants were found guilty by a Scottsboro court in one-day summary trials and given the death penalty - the standard punishment in rape trials of black offenders and white victims at the time.
However, the youthfulness of the perpetrators, the severity of the sentences and serious procedural deficiencies led organizations such as the American Communist Party and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to allege the injustice and racist nature of the proceedings in question Word reported. International Labor Defense , a Communist Party front-line organization, defended the defendants. There was a series of follow-up processes, some of which were of a fundamental nature. In 1932, for example, the US Supreme Court overturned the judgments of the First Instance, saying that the convicts had been restricted in their right to a fair trial (Powell v. Alabama, 287 US 45).
In 1933 a second series of trials took place in Decatur, Alabama . The judgments of the all-white juries were the same as in 1931 and were overturned again by the Supreme Court in 1935 (Norris v. Alabama, 294 US 587). In a third series of trials, the defendant Clarence Norris received the death penalty again, and three of the other defendants received prison terms ranging from 75 to 99 years. The governor of Alabama David Bibb Graves changed in 1938 to the death penalty by Norris in lifelong prison. He was pardoned by Governor George Wallace in 1976 . The other accused had already been released in the 1940s and 1950s. In 2013 three more of them were pardoned posthumously.
literature
- James R. Acker: Scottsboro and its Legacy: The Cases That Challenged American Legal and Social Justice . Praeger, New York, 2007.
- Nate Z. Arthur: Neverlands end: The end of the Neverlands. A big win for Germany. Berlin, New York, 2007.