Scottsboro Case

The Scottsboro Case refers to the trials and appeals arising from the March 25, 1931 arrest of nine African American males for the gang rape of two white females in Alabama. The charges, later shown to be specious, divided the American political left and sparked the incipient civil rights movement in the American South. Organizations that first gained national and international prominence for their part in defending the accused became prime movers in the legal battles of the civil rights movement.

The accused—Olen Montgomery, Clarence Norris, Haywood Patterson, Ozzie Powell, Willie Roberson, Charles Weems, Eugene Williams, Andy Wright, and Roy Wright—who became known as the “Scottsboro Boys”—were arrested by an Alabama deputy sheriff's posse in Paint Rock and taken to the Jackson County Jail in Scottsboro. The Scottsboro Boys, who ranged in age from 12 to 20, had been traveling on a freight train with other migrants from Chattanooga, Tennessee. Two of the migrants, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, told the deputies that they had been gangraped by them. At the 1933 retrial, Ruby Bates admitted that she and Victoria Price had made up the charges because they feared that the posse would arrest them for violation of the Mann Act, which prohibited crossing state lines for “immoral” purposes. Bates said that she and Price had had sex on the train—with two white men.