March 25: The Scottsboro Boys

Today is also the date on which the “Scottsboro Boys” were arrested in Alabama in 1931. They were nine black teenagers, riding a freight train, who were accused of raping two white women and were rushed through a classically racist Southern trial in which all but one were convicted and sentenced to death. The NAACP and the Communist Party USA became involved in the case and brought in attorneys Joseph Brodsky and Irving Schwab. After the Alabama Supreme Court upheld seven of the eight convictions, attorney Walter Pollak appealed to the U.S Supreme Court, which overturned the convictions in a landmark case that established that the constitutional right to due process includes effective legal counsel. In the retrial, surrounded by lynch-mob hatred and threats, attorney Samuel Leibowitz led the defense, in which he challenged the racist aspects of jury selection and courtroom procedures in Alabama and pulled apart the prosecution’s case. Nevertheless, the Scottsboro Boys were again convicted and again had their convictions overturned in the U.S. Supreme Court. After numerous trials, four of them were released with charges dropped, after six years in prison, while four others met their ends as prisoners — even after one of their two women accusers recanted. The trial became an international cause that cast a spotlight on lynching, Jim Crow law, and the use of the death sentence to punish black-on-white rape. The case also helped heighten the black-Jewish connection in the ongoing civil rights struggle. To see a short documentary about the case, look below.

“Now listen, Mr. Attorney-General, I’ve warned you twice about your treatment of my witness. For the last time now, stand back, take your finger out of his eye, and call him ‘Mister.’ ” —Samuel Leibowitz, regarding a black witness