Scottsboro Case

Scottsboro Case, cause célèbre concerning nine black men charged with the rape of two white girls on a freight train in Alabama. The first trial in Scottsboro, Ala. (1931), resulted in death sentences for eight of the men, and after liberals and radicals came to their aid, charging that the verdict was the result of racial prejudice, the decision was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declared (1932) that the defendants' right to counsel had been infringed. Despite the recantation of one of the girls, one of the men was again sentenced to death, and the case once more came before the Supreme Court, which in 1935 decided that there must be a retrial, since the constitutional rights of the defendants had been violated by the illegal exclusion of blacks from jury service. Four of the defendants were subsequently convicted, receiving sentences equivalent to life imprisonment, and the court, although refusing a retrial for them, dropped the rape charges against the five other defendants. The case has frequently figured in literature, and has been the subject of the plays Scottsboro Limited (1932), by Langston Hughes, and They Shall Not Die (1934), by John Wexley.