In their first trial in 1931, all the defendants except 12-year-old Roy Wright were found guilty and sentenced to death by electrocution. Because of his young age, the state sought life imprisonment for Wright, but most jurors insisted on death and deadlocked. Wright's case was declared a mistrial. After several trials, Norris, Andy Wright and Weems were ultimately found guilty: Norris was sentenced to the death penalty while Andy Wright and Weems received 99- and 75-year sentences, respectively. The rape charge against Powell was dropped when he pleaded guilty to stabbing a deputy sheriff during a jail transfer and was sentenced to 20 years. The charges were subsequently dropped against four remaining defendants.

Weems was paroled in 1943, Wright and Norris in 1944. However, Wright and Norris violated their parole by moving to the North and were sent back to prison. Norris was paroled again in 1946, Wright in 1950. Patterson escaped from prison in 1948, was arrested in Detroit and convicted of manslaughter; he died of cancer in prison in 1952. Norris was the last surviving defendant, dying in 1989 at age 76. He was the only Scottsboro defendant who lived to see an official pardon by the State of Alabama (in 1976).
Back to top Victoria Price and Ruby Bates -- The alleged rape victims in the Scottsboro case. In the first trial, Price described how she and Bates were beaten and repeatedly raped by the defendants when they were on their way back to Chattanooga after an unsuccessful job hunt. After the first trial and conviction, a Huntsville detective confirmed that both women were prostitutes. Several black witnesses from Tennessee said

Victoria Price.

in affidavits that they had seen Price "embracing Negro men in dances in Negro houses" and that Bates once bragged that she could "take five Negroes in one night." Another witness claimed that he had let Price use a room for prostitution and that she turned down a white man once because it was "Negro night."

During the second trial, Bates recanted the rape allegations, saying that she and Price had made up the rape story to avoid arrest for vagrancy. The defendants, she admitted, were seized from several different locations in the 42-car train. It was also revealed that Price, who was married, had served time for adultery and fornication.

Bates briefly toured the states as a speaker for the International Labor Defense and then worked in a New York state spinning factory until 1938 when she returned to Huntsville. Price worked at a Huntsville cotton mill until 1938. Both died many years later, Bates in 1976, Price in 1982.
Back to top The International Labor Defense -- A wing of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the United States, devoted to the defense of people it perceived as victims of a class war. The ILD saw African-Americans in the deep South as an oppressed nation that needed liberation and began to support the Scottsboro Boys after they were first convicted in 1931.

Already in the midst of an anti-lynching campaign they had begun a year earlier, the ILD turned the Scottsboro case into a legal and political campaign. It fought for control over the case with the NAACP, which accused the ILD of manipulating and using the defendants for its own propaganda purposes. ILD officials provided the Scottsboro Boys with the adequate legal counsel they lacked in their first trial by engaging Samuel Leibowitz, a well-known New York criminal lawyer who was not a member of the ILD.

The ILD spearheaded the numerous appeals which brought about retrial after retrial in the Scottsboro case. But the ILD also hurt the Scottsboro Boys' case during the third trial: two of its lawyers were caught trying to bribe Price, who had hinted that money could help her change her story.
Back to top The NAACP -- The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People did little to help the Scottsboro Boys in the beginning of their legal wars because of the nature of the charges against them. Critics of the NAACP's inaction said the organization was more concerned with protecting its reputation than with combating injustices against its people. The NAACP only became involved with the Scottsboro case after the ILD began representing the defendants. NAACP officials tried to convince the Scottsboro Boys to let them represent them, arguing that an association with the ILD, combined with the prejudice against African Americans and communists, would seal their executions.

Though the ILD and the Communists saved the Scottsboro Boys from the electric chair, the NAACP became very involved over time, playing a crucial role in securing Norris' 1976 pardon.
Back to top Samuel Leibowitz -- The noted New York attorney who represented the Scottsboro Boys after their 1931 trial. In their second trial, he successfully argued for a change of venue from Scottsboro, Alabama to Decatur, Alabama. Leibowitz produced several pieces of evidence that strongly pointed to the defendants' innocence. Despite the case Leibowitz presented, the jury still convicted the Scottsboro Boys the second time around. Leibowitz then took the case before the U.S. Supreme Court -- which ruled for the on Scottsboro in another landmark decision, Norris v. Alabama (1935).

Back to top Judge James E. Horton -- The Alabama judge who presided over the second round of Scottsboro trials. After reviewing medical evidence that did not support the rape allegations, the lack of physical evidence of sexual activity on part of the boys, and the testimony of Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, Horton boldly set aside the jury's guilty verdicts and ordered a new trial. Under pressure from the Alabama attorney general and the chief justice, Horton then withdrew from the case. He lost the next election and his career quietly unraveled.
Back to top Judge William Washington Callahan -- The judge who presided over the third round of Scottsboro trials. He favored the prosecution and gutted Leibowitz's defense strategy by refusing to admit testimony about Price's sexual activity for two nights prior to the incident. When Judge Callahan gave the jury their instructions, he told them that any intercourse between a black man and white woman was rape. Until Leibowitz reminded him, the judge neglected to tell the jury how to acquit the defendants. Judge Callahan also dismissed a defense motion to quash the indictment because blacks had been excluded from the jury lists. This came back to haunt Callahan as the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the convictions in the trials that occurred in his courtroom.
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Scottsboro Boys | Victoria Price & Ruby Bates | The International Labor Defense | The NAACP | Samuel Leibowitz | Honorable James E. Horton | Honorable William Washington Callahan |

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