The Scottsboro Boys:
Nine Teenagers and the Trial That Exposed American Justice

On March 25, 1931, a group of young Black men and two young white women — all riding illegally on a freight train through Alabama — get into a fight with a group of white men on the train. The white men are thrown off. When the train stops in Paint Rock, Alabama, a sheriff's posse arrests nine Black teenagers: Haywood Patterson, Clarence Norris, Charlie Weems, Olen Montgomery, Willie Roberson, Eugene Williams, Andy Wright, Roy Wright, and Ozie Powell. They range in age from 13 to 20. Most did not know each other before that day.

The two white women — Victoria Price and Ruby Bates — initially claim to have been raped by the young men. (Ruby Bates later recants, testifying at a second trial that no rape occurred; Price never recants.) The accusation, in 1931 Alabama, carries an automatic death sentence. A mob of several thousand people surrounds the Scottsboro jail demanding immediate lynching. The National Guard is called in to prevent it. The defendants are tried within 10 days of their arrest.

The first trials are a travesty by any standard. Defense counsel is an elderly local lawyer so alcoholic that he is visibly impaired in court, and a Tennessee real estate attorney who had never tried a criminal case. The trials take one day each. The juries — all white, as Black people were systematically excluded from Alabama juries — deliberate for minutes. All nine defendants are convicted. Eight are sentenced to death. The ninth, Roy Wright, is 13 years old; the jury deadlocks on his sentence when some jurors want life imprisonment rather than death for a child.

The International Labor Defense (ILD), affiliated with the Communist Party, takes up the case — making the Scottsboro Boys an international cause célèbre. The NAACP initially declines, fearing association with Communists. The ILD's involvement is controversial but effective: it raises money, hires skilled lawyers including Samuel Leibowitz, one of the best defense attorneys in the country, and organizes international pressure including protests in Europe and Latin America that embarrass the U.S. government.

Powell v. Alabama (1932): The Supreme Court rules 7–2 that the defendants' right to adequate counsel under the 14th Amendment was violated. This is the first time the Supreme Court applies the 6th Amendment right to counsel to state criminal proceedings — a landmark ruling that establishes a constitutional requirement for adequate legal representation that still governs American criminal law today.

Norris v. Alabama (1935): The Supreme Court rules unanimously that the systematic exclusion of Black people from Alabama's jury rolls violates the Equal Protection Clause. The Alabama officials had claimed no Black people were qualified to serve on juries — and had been caught falsifying jury rolls. The Court finds the exclusion unconstitutional, establishing a precedent against racially discriminatory jury selection that (imperfectly) governs jury law today.

Despite two Supreme Court victories establishing their constitutional rights had been violated, the defendants are retried and reconvicted. Alabama refuses to acquit. Haywood Patterson is convicted four times. He eventually escapes to Michigan in 1948; the governor of Michigan refuses to extradite him. Clarence Norris, sentenced to death and repeatedly retried, is eventually paroled in 1946. He is the last of the Scottsboro Boys to be officially exonerated — by a pardon from the Governor of Alabama in 1976, 45 years after his arrest.

The Scottsboro case produced two landmark Supreme Court victories and left most of its nine defendants destroyed. Willie Roberson had syphilis so advanced he could barely walk at the time of his arrest — physically incapable of assault. Olen Montgomery was nearly blind. Neither fact mattered at trial. Of the nine: most served prison terms ranging from 6 to 19 years. Several struggled with poverty, mental illness, and alcoholism after release. Haywood Patterson died of cancer in a Michigan prison in 1952, where he had been imprisoned on a manslaughter charge. Andy Wright, the last of the nine to be released, was paroled in 1950 — 19 years after his arrest on a freight train in Alabama.

The final exoneration came in 2013 — 82 years after the arrests — when the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles posthumously pardoned the three who had never received individual pardons or exonerations: Haywood Patterson, Charlie Weems, and Eugene Williams. None of them lived to see it. The case is a perfect illustration of what the Jim Crow justice system was: not a system that occasionally made mistakes, but a system that functioned correctly from the perspective of those who designed it.