African Americana

Portrait of Willie Roberson and Olen Montgomery, both wearing hats and standing with their arms behind them against a brick wall and part of a prison cell door. 4 January 1936. -- Portrait of Ozzie Powell, Eugene Williams, and Roy Wright, all wearing hats and standing casually against a brick wall and prison cell door. 4 January 1936. -- Portrait of Haywood Patterson standing in hole-worn clothing with his hands behind his back, leaning against a brick wall next to a prison cell door. -- Portrait of Attorney Samuel Leibowitz pointing his finger out a window (apparently to the Statue of Liberty) as Eugene Williams, Willie Roberson, Roy Wright, and Olen Montgomery, all recently released from prison, look on. 26 July 1936. -- Together, a group of four Associate Press photographs featuring the "Scottsboro Boys," each 9 x 7 in. or smaller, with applied paper news captions on verso. Conditions generally fair. 

[With:] HERNDON, Angelo. The Scottsboro Boys: Four Freed! Five to Go! New York: Workers Library Publishers, Inc., 1937. Small 8vo. (Chipping, rips to some pages.) Original illustrated wrappers (some paper loss and wear to extremities). 

[With:] 4 1/4 x 2 in. partial sheet of 5-cent postage stamps issued by the International Labor Defense featuring faces of two of the "Scottsboro Boys," with text above reading "Scottsboro / I.L.D. Fund!" (Sheet folded so that each stamp is adhered to the back of another stamp, forming 10 double-sided stamps.)

[Also with:] The Afro American. No. 39. Baltimore, MD, 1 July 1933. 12pp (significant separation to binding and central horizontal fold throughout, with heavy chipping to edges). Issue features cover story with the headline, "Scottsboro Verdict is Set Aside." 

The "Scottsboro Boys" as they came to be called, were a group of nine African American preteens, teenagers, and young men falsely accused of raping two white women on a freight train in northern Alabama in March of 1931. Eight of the defendants were convicted and sentenced to death by an all-white jury, while the ninth was granted a mistrial by the judge on account of his youth. Public outcry and protests in the north succeeded in getting the convictions overturned by the Supreme Court in 1932, citing the defendants' inadequate legal representation. The process of retrial, reconviction, and appeal went on for years, and ultimately the "Scottsboro Boys" served a collective 100+ years in prison. The Scottsboro cases, or rather the widespread indignation and national dialogue they sparked, led to two important Supreme Court decisions reached in 1935 regarding the exclusion of African Americans from jury service. The injustice suffered by the "Scottsboro Boys" also inspired a myriad of popular works including Richard Wright's 1940 novel, Native Son. 

The names of the defendants were Clarence Norris, Charley Weems, Haywood Patterson, Olen Montgomery, Willie Roberson, Roy Wright, Ozzie Powell, Andy Wright, and Eugene Williams.