AL Political Reporter: “In 1931, a train ride in search of work during the height of the Depression nearly ended the lives of nine Black teenage boys — Clarence Norris, Jr., Charlie Weems, Ozie Powell, Andrew Wright, Leroy Wright, Olen Montgomery, Willie Roberson, Haywood Patterson and Eugene Williams — who were falsely accused of rape by two white women.
The young men endured courtroom trials, convictions, retrials and incarceration, collectively spending 130 years in Alabama’s jails and prisons for a crime they did not commit. Referred to by their supporters as the “Scottsboro Boys” because of where the first trial took place, for years they lived on Alabama’s death row where they could hear the buzz of the electric current as it coursed through the bodies of people being executed.
“From the get-go, they never had a chance,” said Larry Dane Brimner, author of ACCUSED!: The Trials of the Scottsboro Boys: Lies, Prejudice, and the Fourteenth Amendment.“