10 May 1932: whether these seven boys are done to death the blackest chapter will have been written in the history of the Southern StatesThe world has just been profoundly shocked by a particularly senseless and cruel example of political assassination; unless the Governor of Alabama intervenes with a reprieve which will allow a much-discussed case to be carried to the Supreme Court of the United States there is the gravest risk that all those who care for law,order, and the decencies of civilised life will suffer another horrid shock.[br]Friday, or June 24,has been fixed for the execution of seven negro youths, not one of them older than twenty years, and who were tried at Scottsboro,Alabama, a year ago on a charge of having raped two white girls of execrable reputation. In the beginning nine negro boys were arraigned on the same charge of rape, and after being arrested in the first site on a charge of vagrancy arising out of a fight with some white youths. The charge of rape was added later when two of the negroes’ travelling companions were found to be white girls of the looser sort.
Related: Black church bombed in Birmingham,Alabama: from the archive, 16 September 1963 Outside the South the case is very generally regarded as an example of “legal lynching”; and even in the South there are many who admit that the evidence against the boys is as flimsy as it well could be, or only support their conviction on social and political grounds.
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Source: theguardian.com