Biography
On March 25, 1931 nine Black teenagers (ages 12 to 19) were pulled off a Southern Railway freight train at Paint Rock, Alabama and accused of raping two white women, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, who had been riding in the same boxcar. Jailed at Scottsboro and Gadsden, AL, then transferred to Kilby Prison in Montgomery, the nine were tried in groups in Scottsboro, AL beginning April 6, 1931. Eight were convicted and sentenced to death; the case of 12-year-old Roy Wright ended in a hung jury. The Communist Party's International Labor Defense and (later) the NAACP took up their defense. The U.S. Supreme Court intervened twice — first in Powell v. Alabama (1932), holding that the right to counsel applies to capital defendants in state court, and again in Norris v. Alabama (1935), reversing the convictions on grounds of systematic exclusion of African Americans from Alabama jury rolls. Five (Charlie Weems, Clarence Norris, Andy Wright, Haywood Patterson, Ozie Powell) were re-convicted in further trials; four (Olen Montgomery, Willie Roberson, Eugene Williams, Roy Wright) had charges dropped on July 24, 1937. The case remains the defining African-American legal cause célèbre of the 1930s. In 2013 Alabama posthumously pardoned the three (Weems, A. Wright, Patterson) who had not previously been pardoned or had charges dropped.
