Patterson v. Alabama (1935)

Background

The Scottsboro Boys saga began in 1931, when two white women falsely accused nine African American young men of raping them aboard a southbound train in northeastern Alabama. The accused narrowly escaped a lynching and subsequently languished in prison while their case evolved into a long legal struggle that revealed the depths of institutionalized racism and white supremacy in the south.

The nine young men, ranging in age from 19 to 12, were hoboing on the Memphis-bound freight train out of Chattanooga, as were their two accusers. All were feeling the effects of the ever-deepening Great Depression, and most were looking for work. A fight between some of the blacks aboard the train and a group of white young men resulted in the whites being forced off just ahead of Paint Rock, Alabama. When word spread of the ouster, a group of white vigilantes assembled in the town, ready to mete out some sort of justice to the group of blacks. It was there that two young white women, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, fearful of being arrested for vagrancy under the Mann Act, agreed upon their rape story and accused the nine.

That the accused were subsequently taken to the county seat of Scottsboro and actually tried in a court of law for their alleged crime was seen by most whites in Alabama as a progressive step. Whites in Alabama, as across the south, had “redeemed” their state from Reconstruction rule and had, beginning in the 1870s, reestablished white supremacy by way of legally codified racial segregation, black disenfranchisement, and extralegal violence, including the lynching of blacks accused of heinous crimes, especially rape. The sanctity of white southern womanhood was tantamount to the purity of the white race, and its violation was a blow to the heart of white supremacy. Thus, when black men were accused by white women of rape, the result was generally death, often by mob justice in the form of lynching.

The Trials

Most whites were satisfied that justice had been even more properly done when an all-white jury hastily convicted the nine of rape on the sole basis of their accusers’ testimony. Eight of the nine were sentenced to death as an angry would-be lynch mob gathering outside the courtroom was held back by the Alabama National Guard. The jury could not unanimously agree to sentence 12-year-old Roy Wright to death, and the judge declared a mistrial. An eventual appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court resulted in a reversal in the Powell decision, on the grounds that the defendants had only had the benefit of a 20-minute meeting with reluctantly appointed counsel prior to their trial. The cases were remanded, and a new round of trials was held in nearby Decatur, Alabama.

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