The Scottsboro Boys: Alabama Justice Documented and Reversed

On March twenty-fifth, nineteen thirty-one, nine Black teenagers were pulled from a freight train near Scottsboro, Alabama. They had been riding the rails the way thousands of young men rode them during the Depression, looking for work or running from the absence of it. Two white women were also on the train. The women said they had been raped. Within weeks, eight of the nine teenagers were sentenced to death by all-white juries. The ninth, Roy Wright, whose age is recorded variously as twelve, thirteen, or fourteen in different sources, received a mistrial when the jury could not agree to sentence a child to death.

The case went to the United States Supreme Court twice. In Powell versus Alabama in nineteen thirty-two, the Court ruled that the defendants had been denied their right to effective legal counsel, a ruling that established a constitutional principle well beyond the specific case. In Norris versus Alabama in nineteen thirty-five, the Court ruled that the systematic exclusion of Black jurors from the trial violated the Constitution. Both convictions were overturned.

Alabama retried the defendants anyway. One of the two accusers, Ruby Bates, publicly recanted her testimony. The retractions did not matter. Alabama continued to convict, continued to sentence, continued to hold. The last survivor of the Scottsboro Boys, Clarence Norris, was pardoned by the governor of Alabama in nineteen seventy-six, forty-five years after his arrest. He was nineteen years old when the police pulled him off the train.

The Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery has documented the Scottsboro case as a foundational example of the machinery of racially biased criminal prosecution that the organization was built to challenge. The case is geography's outlier in this corridor, up in northeastern Alabama rather than the Selma-Montgomery-Birmingham triangle, but it belongs to the same story.