Scottsboro Trial

Here's more as some people requested on the Scottsboro trial that I based Tom Robinson off of and had mentioned a while back. -

In 1931, during the Depression, a common pasttime was jumping on trains, and there was an ungodly large number of hoboes travelling the rails, looking for work, adventure, etc.

On March 25, a fight broke out between two groups of youths riding the rails - one group black boys and the other white boys. Back in town, after losing the fight to the black boys, the white young men report the incident as a gang attack (even though one of the white boys technically started it by stepping on a black young man's hand), and the train was wired so the 'gang' could be apprehended. Two white girls in town, upon the groups arrest, also claimed the black youths had gang raped them.

Upon being thrown in prison, the defendants had injustice upon injustice thrown upon them. Violence, lukewarm efforts to even give the boys a fair trial, and definitely a taking of white word over black. It was said that in Alabama, "Communists were treated with slightly more courtesy."

Despite clear evidence for the defense, most of the Scottsboro defendents were held for 6 years in rat-infested, deplorable prisons without trial. When trials came, sentences like 99 and 75 years came out, death row tossed around. Years and years later, their obvious innocence managed to get the Scottsboro boys paroled.

This trial made obvious that in the South of the 1930s, jurors were not willing to think of a black man committing a crime against whites as "innocent until proved guilty", but "guilty until undeniably innocent."