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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2016
At the Scottsboro, Alabama Courthouse in April 1931, nine young black men, charged with raping two white women on a freight train, stood trial. Without proper counsel, their trials took only four days and all were found guilty. Eight received a death sentence; the youngest boy life in prison. The NAACP and Communist Party (CP) vied to represent the “Scottsboro Boys,” but the CP prevailed.
When Clarence Norris was retried and convicted in 1933, his attorney appealed on grounds that blacks were barred by color from the jury venire. Even so, the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the lower court verdict. However, the US Supreme Court overruled that decision, concluding in Norris that when “all persons of the African race are excluded ... as grand jurors in the criminal prosecution of a person of the African race, the equal protection of the laws is denied to him.” Norris, still incarcerated, was not paroled until 1943. He received a full pardon in 1977.
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