Scottsboro Case

Scottsboro Case. The 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 their case; one was drunk, the other senile).

In a 1933 retrial, Ruby Bates recanted her accusation, and new evidence strongly contradicted Victoria Price. The jury nevertheless convicted. When the presiding judge James Edwin Horton ordered yet another trial, state officials removed him from the case, found a more amenable judge, and pushed through convictions and death sentences for two defendants, Haywood Patterson and Clarence Morris.

In Norris v. Alabama (1934), the Supreme Court ruled that the two defendants had been denied a fair trial because of Alabama's systematic exclusion of African Americans from its jury rolls. In 1937, with the Communist party no longer in the case, the defense attorney Samuel Leibowitz brokered a deal whereby four of the defendants were released and state prosecutors tacitly promised that the others would be paroled once publicity had died down. Not for thirteen years, however, did Alabama release the last of the Scottsboro defendants.
See also New Deal Era, The; Racism; Rape; Segregation, Racial; South, The.

Bibliography

Dan T. Carter , Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South, rev. ed., 1979.
James Goodman , Stories of Scottsboro, 1994.

Dan T. Carter