Who are the Scottsboro Boys?

Answer 1

The case of the Scottsboro Boys arose in Scottsboro, Alabama during the 1930s, when nine black youths, ranging in age from thirteen to nineteen, were accused of raping two white women, one of whom would later recant.

The trials, in which the youths were convicted and sentenced to death by all-white juries despite the weak and contradictory testimonies of the witnesses, are regarded as one of the worst travesties of justice perpetrated against blacks in the post-Reconstruction South.

The case quickly became an international cause célèbre and the boys were represented by the American Communist Party's legal defense organization. The death sentences, originally scheduled to be carried out quickly, were postponed pending appeals that took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the sentences were overturned. Despite the fact that one of the women later denied being raped, the retrials resulted in convictions. All of the defendants were eventually acquitted, paroled, or pardoned (besides one who escaped), some after serving years in prison.

The Scottsboro case later inspired Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize winning To Kill a Mockingbird

Answer 2

They were victims of the deep-seated racial prejudice that pervaded a number of states in the deep South well into the 1960's.

At this time in history, accused was as good as convicted if a black man was charged with the rape of a white woman (a white man could rape a black woman with virtual impunity). It was little more than a knee-jerk reaction; the prevailing notion was that no white woman was safe around a black man. The presumption was that black men were simply consumed with lust for white women and that blacks were so "primitive" that they couldn't possibly be expected to do anything else but act on these urges.

The alleged victims of the rape by these nine young men were not the "respectable," middle-class women that these myths were perpetrated to "protect." They were, in fact, "vagabonds" themselves, hopping the freight trains just as the Scottsboro Boys themselves had done.

There is speculation that the women were engaged in prostitution; if that were indeed the case, the entire thing could have grown out of a dispute over payment. It's significant, whatever the underlying reason, that one of the alleged victims recanted her testimony; what is equally significant is that it took little more than the accusation to secure a conviction--even allowing for the lack of forensic investigation at the time.

This was, as so often has occurred throughout the ages and in many places, not a simple miscarriage of justice. It was more like a back street abortion of it, and the accused were more fortunate than many of their counterparts in other times and places in that there were people willing to speak out against the wrong being done to them.

Answer 3

They were 9 black men in Scottsboro, AL accused of raping 2 white women on a freight train traveling from Chattanooga, TN to Memphis, TN.

Answer 4

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottsboro_Boys