Important facts about the scottsboro trials

April 9: The case against Roy Wright, aged 13, ends in a hung jury when 11 jurors seek a death sentence, and one votes for life imprisonment. April-December: Shocked by the speedy trials, the extreme youth of the defendants, and the severity of the sentences, progressive national organizations take up the Scottsboro case and call for the country to reject the "Alabama frame-up.

June The executions of the defendants are stayed pending appeal to the Alabama Supreme Court. January 5: A letter from Ruby Bates to a boyfriend surfaces; in it, she denies having been raped.

March The Alabama Supreme Court, voting , upholds the convictions of seven of the defendants, granting Eugene Williams a new trial because he was a juvenile at the time of his conviction. November 7: In Powell v. Alabama, the U. Supreme Court rules that the defendants were denied the right to counsel, which violated their right to due process under the Fourteenth Amendment. The cases are remanded to the lower court. He agrees. April 6: Ruby Bates appears as a surprise witness for the defense, denying that any rape occurred and testifying that she was with Victoria Price for the whole train ride.

Her assertion that she and Price were with boyfriends the night before explains the presence of semen in their vaginas. On the stand, Dr. Bridges admits that the sperm found in his examination were non-motile, and indicates that Victoria Price showed few physical signs of having been forcibly raped by six men, as she claimed, but he refuses to say how old the semen could have been.

April Judge Horton sets the sentence of death for Patterson, and then suspends it on a motion for a new trial. Then, the judge postpones the trials of the other defendants because tensions in town are running too high to expect a "just and impartial verdict. November Seven of the defendants appear in Callahan's court. November-December: The trials of Patterson and Norris end in death sentences for both. Judge Callahan's bias might be exemplified by his omissions: he forgets to explain to Patterson's jury how to render a not guilty verdict Leibowitz reminds him before the jury goes out and neglects to ask the mercy of God upon Norris's soul.

June The Alabama Supreme Court unanimously denies the defense motion for new trials. The judge would be rewarded for this brave action by losing his bid for reelection the following year. Prosecutors got the cases in front of a more sympathetic judge, and both Patterson and Norris were retried, convicted and sentenced to death in late Supreme Court. In January , the Supreme Court again overturned the guilty verdicts, ruling in Norris v.

This second landmark decision in the Scottsboro Boys case would help integrate future juries across the nation. Early in , Patterson was convicted for a fourth time, but sentenced to 75 years in prison. The day after the verdict, Ozie Powell was shot in the head after attacking a deputy sheriff with a knife; both men survived.

Through negotiations with the defense, prosecutors agreed to drop rape charges against Powell, but he was convicted of assaulting the deputy sheriff and sentenced to 20 years. They also dropped rape charges against the four remaining defendants—Montgomery, Roberson, Williams and Leroy Wright—and all four were released.

Convicted of manslaughter after a barroom brawl in , Patterson died of cancer in Clarence Norris, who received a pardon from Governor George Wallace of Alabama in , would outlive all of the other Scottsboro Boys, dying in at the age of In , the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles voted unanimously to issue posthumous pardons to Patterson, Weems and Andy Wright, bringing a long-overdue end to one of the most notorious cases of racial injustice in U.

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Loving v. Virginia was a Supreme Court case that struck down state laws banning interracial marriage in the United States. The plaintiffs in the case were Richard and Mildred Loving, a white man and Black woman whose marriage was deemed illegal according to Virginia state law. The details of their skirmish with a group of white men and two women on the train are still unclear. But by the end of the train ride, nine young men—all African American, The Great Migration was the relocation of more than 6 million African Americans from the rural South to the cities of the North, Midwest and West from about to Driven from their homes by unsatisfactory economic opportunities and harsh segregationist laws, many Black The Rosewood Massacre was an attack on the predominantly African American town of Rosewood, Florida, in by large groups of white aggressors.

The town was entirely destroyed by the end of the violence, and the residents were driven out permanently. She later marched in protests and spoke at rallies for the accused. In addition, Samuel Liebowitz, the ILD's non-Communist lead attorney, found numerous inconsistencies in Price's testimony and highlighted the medical examinations of Price and Bates, which refuted the pair's charge of rape.

But once more the jury returned a guilty verdict and recommended the death penalty. Then, in an act of incredible courage, Judge James Horton overrode the jury's verdict. Horton had carefully reviewed the evidence and met privately with one of the medical examiners, who told him he thought the girls were lying. Lawyers for the state, however, continued to pursue the case, this time under a judge sympathetic to the prosecution.

In December , Haywood Patterson and Clarence Norris were convicted of rape and sentenced to death for a third time by another all-white jury. Five other defendants remained in prison, awaiting new trials, while the remaining two were removed to juvenile court and later convicted. Scottsboro Defendants Following this latest round of guilty verdicts, ILD attorneys attempted to bribe Victoria Price in a foolish act of desperation.

When the bribe came to light, Liebowitz, whose relationship with the ILD was always tenuous, severed ties with the group and established his own rival defense organization, the American Scottsboro Committee ASC.

The attempted bribe and the departure of Liebowitz marked the beginning of the end for the ILD as the leader of the Scottsboro legal defense. In January of , the U. Supreme Court agreed to review the third convictions of Patterson and Norris. Three months later, the court once again overturned the guilty verdicts and ordered new trials, ruling in Patterson v.

Alabama and Norris v. Alabama that the defendants were denied a fair trial because African Americans had been systematically excluded from Jackson County jury rolls.

The landmark decision paved the way for the integration of juries across the nation. Scottsboro Boys Museum and Cultural Center Patterson was convicted of rape for a fourth time in January , but this time his sentence was set at 75 years in prison.

Following the verdict, another of the defendants, Ozzie Powell, was shot in the head after attacking a deputy sheriff in an apparent escape attempt. After Patterson's conviction was upheld in the Alabama Supreme Court, the prosecution and the Scottsboro Defense Committee agreed to a strange compromise in an effort to end the long ordeal. Clarence Norris was convicted of rape and sentenced to death; Norris' sentence was subsequently commuted to life imprisonment by Alabama governor Bibb Graves.

Andy Wright and Charlie Weems also were convicted of rape and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. Rape charges were dropped against Powell, but he was convicted of assaulting the deputy sheriff and sentenced to 20 years. Thus, on the basis of the same body of evidence, four defendants were freed and four convicted. In , a final attempt to win the remaining prisoners' freedom failed when both the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles and Governor Graves denied pardon applications.

Charlie Weems was paroled in ; Clarence Norris and Andy Wright were paroled a year later but both were sent back to prison shortly thereafter for violating the terms of their probation; Ozzie Powell was paroled in ; Haywood Patterson escaped from prison in Norris, the last surviving defendant, was finally pardoned in On April 19, , Alabama governor Robert Bentley signed historic legislation exonerating the nine men of all guilt in the case at the Scottsboro Boys Museum and Cultural Center in Scottsboro.

Clarence Norris Jr.