Scottsboro case was one of the most important cases of the civil rights movement in the United States. The name actually refers to several court cases that lasted almost seven years during the 1930’s. Three of the cases eventually were tried before the Supreme Court of the United States. The Scottsboro case focused attention on the problems of Black people in the South. Many people believe the case started the civil rights movement.
The case began in 1931 in Scottsboro, Ala. Several teenagers, some Black and some white, were hitching rides on a train. A fight broke out between the Black and white youths. Members of the white group accused nine Black men of raping two white women in the group. The Black youths came to be called the “Scottsboro boys.” Eight were sentenced to death. The trial of the ninth was declared a mistrial. The Supreme Court overturned the convictions in 1932 in the case of Powell v. Alabama. The court ruled that the defendants had not been well represented by lawyers.
Alabama officials refused to drop the case. A new trial for one of the defendants, Haywood P. Patterson, began in 1933 in Decatur, Alabama. By then, the case had attracted national attention, and many people believed the Scottsboro boys to be victims of racial prejudice. The Communist Party hired a famous non-Communist attorney, Samuel S. Leibowitz, to represent Patterson. One of the two supposed rape victims retracted her testimony during the trial. The jury convicted Patterson. But the judge disagreed with the verdict and ordered a new trial. In December 1933, Patterson and another defendant, Clarence Norris, were convicted of rape in a third trial.
In 1935, the Supreme Court overturned the two convictions because Black citizens had not been allowed to serve on juries in Alabama. However, Alabama officials refused to drop the charges against any of the defendants. Trials in 1936 and 1937 resulted in conviction and long prison sentences for five of the defendants. The charges against the other four defendants were dropped.
By 1950, four of those convicted were paroled. The fifth—Patterson—escaped to Michigan, where the governor refused to surrender him to Alabama officials. In 2013, Alabama officials issued posthumous (after death) pardons to Patterson and two other men wrongly convicted in the case.
