Scottsboro Trials Research Paper

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Throughout history, our U.S government has often been based on the philosophy that a person is innocent until proven otherwise, yet this belief has often been disturbed by the lack of integrated racial equality in our legal system. The infamous Scottsboro Trials is a portrayal of this unjust action in history. The Scottsboro Trials were a recurring group of cases that challenged American legal and social justice from 1931-1937. The crime accused nine African American teenage boys of allegedly raping two Caucasian American females. The nine boys accused for this trial were Charles Weems, Clarence Norris, Andy Wright, Ozzie Powell, Ollen Montgomery, Eugene Williams, Willie Roberson, Roy Wright, Haywood Patterson, who at the time were all under the minor age of 19, when they were falsely accused of assaulting …show more content…
Four white males and two white females were also aboard the train, returning to Huntsville after obtaining unsuccessful job searches in the cotton mills of Chattanooga. Haywood Petterson was hang off the side of the tank car, when a white youth stepped on his hand. Petterson, being a troubled black youth offended by the action of a Caucasian American, defended himself in the sudden position of victimization. As a result, a quarrel broke out between the riders of the train causing a major dispute to erupt. When the train arrived at the station, a group of white boys approached the stationmaster and reported that they had been assaulted on the train. Additionally, Bates and Price reported that they had been gang raped on the rain from Chattanooga. The nine African American boys were arrested, and would soon come to be known as “The Scottsboro Boys.”
Twelve days after the arrest, the first trial began in the courtroom of Judge A.E Hawkins. Haywood Patterson described
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