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Preserving history
Published December 20, 2009
It took less than a month for eight of nine young black men accused of raping two white women to be convicted and sentenced to death in what came to be known as “The Scottsboro Boys” case.
The nine, ranging in age from 13-21, were pulled off a westbound train near Paint Rock on March 25, 1931, arrested and returned to Scottsboro on the back of a flatbed truck.
All but 13-year-old Roy Wright were convicted and sentenced by an all-white Jackson County jury to die in Alabama’s electric chair in a trial that ended on April 9, 1931.
On Sunday, an open house will be held at Joyce Chapel United Methodist Church on West Willow Street in Scottsboro where an official announcement will be made that the facility, built in 1904, is set to become the official site for museum dedicated to the Scottsboro Boys case.
The church can trace its roots to 1878. Though it officially closed in January 2009 it was home to some of Jackson County’s most well-know black families. Some of those who attended the church include: Irene, Jordan, Mary Jo Lankford, Wiley T. Snodgrass, Rev. Jessie K. Sanford and Fannie K. Sanford. Mary Abernathy and her nephew and niece are the last members of the Sanford family to attend the church.
The Scottsboro-Jackson County Multi-Cultural Heritage Foundation has leased the building and hopes to raise money to purchase it and preserve it as a historic black church and use it as the site of the Scottsboro Boys Museum.
The sentences were challenged, in part based on statements from Ruby Bates one of the two women involved in the case, resulting in new trials. A mistrial had been declared in Wright’s case due, in part, to his age.
Bates, 17 at the time the incident allegedly occurred, recounted her allegations in a letter sent to a friend. In an interview with Afro-American Newspaper in Washington, D.C., Bates reportedly denied she had been raped.
Victoria Price, the other woman involved in the case, apparently never recounted her story.
The second trial, which began on March 28, 1933, was held in Decatur following a defense motion for a change of venue. A series of trials for each of the accused lasted several years. Each of the men involved served between six and 19 years in jail.
Charges were dropped against five of the nine young men. Three were paroled and Clarence Norris, who was sentenced to death, was pardoned by Alabama Governor George Wallace 55 years after the incident occurred. At the time he was wanted in the state for parole violations. He died at the age of 76 in 1989, the last of the Scottsboro Boys.
Douglas O. Linder, author of “The Trials of the ‘The Scottsboro Boys,’” wrote, “No crime in American history — let alone a crime that never occurred — produced as many trials, convictions, reversals, and retrials as did an alleged gang rape of two white girls by nine black teenagers on a Southern Railroad freight run on March 25, 1931. Over the course of the two decades that followed, the struggle for justice of the ‘Scottsboro Boys,’ as the black teens were called, made celebrities out of anonymities, launched and ended careers, wasted lives, produced heroes, opened southern juries to blacks, exacerbated sectional strife and divided America’s political left.”
In the end, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on the case twice. Its final decision established that criminal defendants are entitled to effective legal counsel and that people cannot be excluded from juries because of race.
Since the incident occurred, it and the resulting criminal case have been the subject of various articles, books, television documentaries and movies. Many consider it as the real beginning of the Civil Rights movement. The museum is to preserve the records of the case and to teach the public of the role that the case played in the Civil Rights movement.
For more information on the Foundation and the museum, contact Cliff Parrish at 244-1310, Shelia Washington, Gary or Kim Speers, Garry Morgan or Charles Elliott.
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