The Scottsboro Boys were accused of raping two white women, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, aboard a Southern Railroad freight train in northern Alabama on March 25, 1931.1National Museum of African American History and Culture. The Scottsboro Boys The nine African American teenagers charged did not commit the crime. One of the two accusers later admitted the allegations were fabricated, and a medical examination conducted the day of the arrest contradicted the women’s account.
How the Accusation Started
The nine youths were riding freight cars in search of work during the Great Depression, as many young people of every race did at the time. A white youth walking across the top of a tank car stepped on the hand of Haywood Patterson, who was hanging on to the side.1National Museum of African American History and Culture. The Scottsboro Boys A rock-throwing fight broke out between a group of white youths and the Black youths in the same open gondola car. The Black youths overpowered the others and forced most of them off the moving train.
The ejected white youths reported the fight, a stationmaster wired ahead, and by the time the train reached Paint Rock, Alabama, an armed posse was waiting.2Famous Trials. The Trials of the Scottsboro Boys All nine Black youths were pulled off the train and arrested on assault charges. The case at that point was a violent dispute over space in the freight cars.
The charges changed when two white women were found among the passengers. Victoria Price and Ruby Bates had been riding the same train, dressed in overalls, also traveling in search of work. Questioned by members of the posse and local law enforcement, both women accused all nine of the detained youths of raping them during the ride.3Famous Trials. The Scottsboro Boys Trials: A Chronology An assault case became a capital case. A lynch mob gathered outside the jail, and the governor deployed the National Guard to keep the crowd from breaking down the doors.
Who the Nine Defendants Were
The nine accused were Haywood Patterson, Clarence Norris, Charlie Weems, Ozie Powell, Willie Roberson, Andy Wright, Olen Montgomery, Eugene Williams, and Roy Wright. They were teenagers, and two were children. Eugene Williams was thirteen. Roy Wright was twelve. A grand jury indicted all nine for rape on March 30, five days after the arrest, and trials began on April 6 before Judge A.E. Hawkins.3Famous Trials. The Scottsboro Boys Trials: A Chronology2Famous Trials. The Trials of the Scottsboro Boys The juries were entirely white. No Black citizens sat on the grand jury or on any of the trial juries, even though Jackson County had a significant Black population. Defense attorneys had almost no time to prepare. Within four days, eight of the nine had been convicted and sentenced to death.
The Evidence That Contradicted the Charge
The Medical Examination
Dr. E.R. Bridges examined Victoria Price the same day as the arrest. He testified that he found no cuts on Price’s head, face, chest, abdomen, back, or legs. Her vagina was not torn. He noted only a couple of minor scratches on one wrist and forearm and a small bruise on the small of her back about the size of a pecan.4Famous Trials. Trial Excerpt of Dr. E.R. Bridges Price had described being attacked by nine armed men on a bed of jagged gravel in an open freight car. The physical findings were almost impossible to reconcile with that account.
Ruby Bates’s Recantation
On January 5, 1932, Ruby Bates wrote a letter to her boyfriend stating that the allegations were false. She wrote that police had pressured her into lying, that none of the accused had touched her, and that she did not want the men to be executed on her account.5Famous Trials. Letter from Ruby Bates to Earl Streetman Bates then appeared as a defense witness at Haywood Patterson’s 1933 retrial and testified under oath that the rapes never happened and that she had fabricated her earlier testimony to support Victoria Price’s story.6Alexander Street Documents. Excerpts from the Testimony of Ruby Bates Victoria Price never recanted.
The all-white Alabama jury convicted Patterson again and sentenced him to death. That pattern repeated across later retrials. Regardless of the medical evidence, and regardless of Bates’s sworn recantation, convictions kept coming.
What Happened After the Accusation
The case produced two U.S. Supreme Court decisions that reversed convictions and reshaped American criminal procedure. In Powell v. Alabama (1932), the Court held that the defendants had been denied their constitutional right to effective counsel, ruling that in a capital case a trial court must assign counsel capable of mounting a real defense when the defendant cannot.7Library of Congress. Powell v. Alabama, 287 U.S. 45 (1932) In Norris v. Alabama (1935), the Court held that the systematic exclusion of Black citizens from grand juries and trial juries violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, even though no Alabama law explicitly barred them.8Library of Congress. Norris v. Alabama, 294 U.S. 587 (1935) Both decisions reversed convictions in the case.
The defendants themselves spent years cycling through retrials, imprisonment, reduced charges, paroles, and escapes. Andy Wright, the last of the nine to leave Alabama’s custody, was paroled in 1950. Clarence Norris, the last known surviving defendant, received a full and unconditional pardon from Governor George Wallace on October 25, 1976, after the State Pardon and Parole Board unanimously found he had been innocent from the start. In April 2013, the Alabama Legislature established a procedure for posthumous pardons, and the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles voted unanimously to issue them to the defendants who had died without being cleared, formally closing a case that had begun eighty-two years earlier with a false accusation at a rail stop in Paint Rock.1National Museum of African American History and Culture. The Scottsboro Boys