Whether you are black or white it behooves you to know American history. The state of Alabama is now addressing one of the most infamous cases of the 20th Century – the false convictions of the Scottsboro Boys, who had been wrongly accused of raping two white girls on a freight train in 1931. Eighty years after the fact, Alabama is preparing to pardon the nine boys for a crime that history has shown they did not commit. None of the Scottsboro Boys lived to see this day. The nine boys, aged 12 to 19, were among the people hopping a freight train to Memphis when on, March 25, 1931, they got on the wrong side of some white boys who were also hoboing on the train. A fight ensued when a white boy stepped on the hand a black boy as he was holding onto the sides of the freight car. Some of the whites who fell off the train during the fight went to the authorities and said that some black boys had attacked them. An armed white posse held up the train and rounded up every black teenager on it. When the posse discovered that two white girls were on the train, it was concluded that the boys must have raped the girls. The nine boys, some of whom had not known each other before and who said they had not seen the girls from where they were on the freight train, were tied up together and jailed in Scottsboro. They would come to be known for the rest of their lives as the Scottsboro Boys. The case involved one injustice after another against the backdrop of Jim Crow-era mob sentiment: demands for a lynching, a hastily-called trial, the boys defended by a reluctant and inexperienced real estate lawyer drafted to take their case, perfunctory testimony, summary death penalty convictions, appeals and re-trials and ultimately convictions of the boys, despite the hazy testimony of one girl and the recanting of the second girl who said the boys hadn’t touched her and that she’d never seen them on that freight train. The case became a cause célèbre, which likely helped them escape execution. Still they spent years in the rat-infested prisons of Depression-era Alabama and, after having served out their time, several migrated North, but never seemed to recover from what they had endured. One of them served in the merchant marines, but, after his discharge, killed his wife before shooting himself in 1959. The last of the Scottsboro boys died in 1989. None of them saw justice in their lifetimes. In 2004, the town of Scottsboro erected a marker commemorating the case at the courthouse where the boys were convicted. Last week, seeking to redress the injustice, the Alabama legislature voted unanimously to pardon the Scottsboro Boys. huffingtonpost/2013/04/05/scottsboro-boys_n_3019923.html
Posted on: Wed, 18 Sep 2013 02:16:16 +0000
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