African Americana

9 x 12 in. letterpress broadside (chipping with some paper loss to edges and corners). Ink inscription "Buffalo" at bottom. Broadside invites readers to a meeting held at St. Luke's A.M.E. Church on 30 January 1936 under the auspices of the National Scottsboro Defense Committee, featuring a discussion of the Scottsboro cases led by representatives of the NAACP, the League for Industrial Democracy, and the ACLU. 

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.