scottsboro boys

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The Scottsboro Boys trials, one of the most notorious and tragic chapters of the South’s racial history caught the attention of people around the world. Nine black men suffered after being wrongly accused and convicted of beating eight white men and sexually abusing two white women. The trials of the Scottsboro boys ruined the lives of the men from there on out. The whole ordeal was seemed to be one big white smiling face.
On March 25, 1931 the Southern Railroad's Chattanooga to Memphis freight with two dozen or so people, and it consisted of mainly men looking for a job. While on the train a stone throwing fight erupted between the black and white men on the train. Soon after the blacks succeeded in throwing all but one of the white men off the train, Orville Gilley was pulled back on after the train accelerated to a dangerous speed. After the whites were forced off the train they went to the nearest police station and reported that the black men on the train had assaulted them. The white youth lied because they were the men who had started the fight in the first place. When the train pulled into the train station the police captured nine of the black men on a flat back truck and took them to jail in Scottsboro.
Twelve days after the arrest of the men, trial began. Six of the black men denied ever raping the women or to have even seen them, but due to the beatings and assaults taken place in jail three of the men falsely admitted to sexually abusing the two women, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price. The NAACP did not rush to defend the men because they were concerned about what might happen if the boys did indeed turn out to the guilty. The communist rushed to the black men’s side because they saw it as a way to bring in Southern bl...

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... knowledge or guilt concerning a rape aboard the Chattanooga to Memphis freight, a rape that Graves still believed occurred. Governor Graves left office without issuing the pardons. Through parole or escaping all of the Scottsboro boys managed to leave Alabama. The men who left on parole were Charles Weems, Ozie Powell, Clarence Norris, and Andy Wright. Haywood Patterson managed to escape the confines of prison. Patterson and Norris carried on their lives by writing books and one was even published. Soon after the book being published Patterson was arrested by the FBI. By 1989 the last of the boys had passed away.
The Scottsboro boy’s story was a shameful time in the history of the United States. It showed how unwilling the south was to listen to colored people and little they valued their lives. Haywood Patterson even said it was, “one big smiling white face.”

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