Updated Tuesday, July 26, 2005  

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However, there lives were forever altered on March 24, 1931 when they were arrested and charged with a sexual attack against to white women that never happened. It mattered not that one was just a lad of thirteen years. The men were tried, convicted, and sentenced despite a written statement from one of the women that the incident never occurred.

The Scottsboro Case The Scottsboro Case stemmed from arrests, on March 9, 1931, of nine young blacks, in Scottsboro, Alabama, for the alleged rape of two white girls. The following month, although the evidence against them consisted largely of the testimony of the girls involved, one of whom subsequently recanted, eight of the accused were sentenced to death and the ninth, only 13 years old, to life imprisonment. Many Americans, including such eminent lawyers as Clarence Darrow, considered the verdict unfounded and brought about by racial bias; civic organizations supported the Scottsboro boys, as they came to be called, and their case became an international cause célèbre. After six years of appeals and retrials, during which the U.S. Supreme Court twice declared mistrials, five of the original indictments were dropped. The remaining four men received long prison terms. Heywood Patterson, regarded by the prosecution as the leader of the group, drew 75 years. By 1946 all were paroled except Patterson, who, two years later, escaped to Michigan, where the state government refused to extradite him to Alabama. Patterson was co-author of Scottsboro Boy (1950).

Can you now appreciate why so few black Americans harbor any HOPE for a better day in the U.S.A.?