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Scottsboro Trial Essay

1085 Words5 Pages

“That trial is not fair where affection is judge.”- Thomas Fuller. At a time when the country was divided between the judgement of a person’s skin color and justice. In 1931 The Scottsboro Trial was an underrated in American history. As the country was in the depths of the Depression (Timeline). The nation struggled with racism. An alleged gang rape of two white girls by nine black teenagers on a southern Railroad(Famous Trial). Nothing has yet to spark the Civil Rights Movement until Nine boys that were falsely accused of abuse and rape. A trial that was tried and appealed in Alabama and twice before the U.S. Supreme Court(Salter).Nine black youths are facing life or death sentence. Over the past two decades that followed, the struggle …show more content…

During the train ride there had been a fight that was caused because a white man step on the hand of a black youth named Haywood Patterson almost causing him to the fall off of the train. Haywood Patterson and the rest of the nine boys aboard the train to look for jobs better than what they previously had (“Scottsboro: An American Tragedy). Some of the whites forced off the train went to the stationmaster in Stevenson to report what they described as an assault by a gang of blacks and one of the girls told one of the posse members that they had been rape by a gang of 12 blacks with pistols and knives (Trials). After the fight the train was forced stop by and angers posses in Paint Rock, Alabama (Timeline). As news started spreading, dozens of men with guns rushed at the train as it ground to round up every black youth they could find. Nine captured blacks that were soon to be called “The Scottsboro Boys: were tied together with plow line, laid on a flat back truck and then taken to the jail in Scottsboro. When they arrived to the jail there were already people ready to lynch they nine boys. But their plans were foiled by Governor B.M. Miller as he ordered the National Guard to Scottsboro to protect the boys. Twelve days after their arrest the trials had begun

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Imagine that your living in the 1930s, you’re a white woman, and you had just gotten “raped” by a black man or group of black men. This exact scenario happened in the critically acclaimed book To Kill a Mockingbird and in the real-life court case deemed the Scottsboro trial. Which in both the book and the court case, the characters, and people were shaped and influenced by society to become victims and accusers. This paper is going compare and contrast how the fictional character Mayella and the non-fictional plaintiff Victoria Price and Ruby Bates as painted victims and accusers by society.

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