The Scottsboro Boys: The Case That Exposed American Injustice

On 25 March 1931, a white teenager walking across the top of a freight car in northern Alabama stepped on the hand of a Black teenager named Haywood Patterson, who was hanging on to the side of the same train. A fight broke out. By the time it ended, a posse of armed men had stopped the train at a small station called Paint Rock, pulled nine young Black men off it, tied them together with plow line, and driven them to a jail in a town called Scottsboro. Two young white women who'd also been...