How many scottsboro boys died

Search Go. Scottsboro Boys Timeline. The black boys are accused of rape by Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, two white women also pulled from the train. Though all jurors believe the Boys to be guilty, the trials result in a hung jury.

Judge Hawkins declares a mistrial and sentences eight of the Boys to death by electric chair. He fell in love, moved to Gadsden, Alabama, and worked in a Goodyear plant. After his girlfriend left him, he made his way to the railroad tracks.

He was headed to Sheffield, Alabama to visit an aunt and to find work. In prison, after witnessing men die on death row, Clarence suffered nightmares of dying in the chair. Haywood was born in Elberton, Georgia, the fourth of nine living children to sharecroppers Claude and Janie. He was devoted to his parents and was especially close to his mother. He left school in the third grade to work as a delivery boy.

With his parents having so many mouths to feed, Haywood ate meals away from home as much as possible and eventually left home at fourteen. He hopped freight trains from Ohio to Florida looking for work and was on his way from Chattanooga to work as a steel worker when he was arrested.

After he was in jail he regretted not paying more attention in school. Using a Bible and a dictionary, he taught himself to read and write in eight months. Ozie was born in rural Georgia. He was quiet and shy, had only one year of school and could only write his name. Raised by his mother and stepfather, he began working hard labor jobs at thirteen. He ran away at fourteen, liked to travel and worked odd jobs while on the road. In February , a guard paid one of Patterson's friends to kill him.

This "friend" stabbed him twenty times, puncturing a lung and sending him to the brink of death. Amazingly, he recovered. After alternating between being a maniacal terror and a model prisoner, Patterson managed to get himself transferred to Kilby Prison, and assigned to the prison farm.

In Patterson made a successful prison break. Escaping to Detroit, he was eventually caught by the FBI, but the governor of Michigan refused to allow him to be extradited to Alabama. Still in Detroit, Patterson worked with a journalist, Earl Conrad, to write his autobiography.

Scottsboro Boy was published in June In December of that year, he was arrested after a fight in a bar resulted in a stabbing death. His first trial ended in a hung jury; the second was a mistrial. After his third trial, he was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to six to fifteen years.

He served only one, as he died of cancer in jail on August 24, Ozie Powell "Momma ain't but one thing I want to tell you right now. Don't let Sam Leibowitz have anything else to do with my case. Ozie Powell was born in rural Georgia, near Atlanta, in His parents separated when he was young and his mother worked for white people in Atlanta. He could write his name, but not much else.

When he was fourteen, he left home, working at camps and sawmills for weeks or months at a time before moving on. A year after leaving home, he was headed toward Memphis on a Southern Railroad train. At Haywood Patterson's first trial, Powell testified that he had followed a group of black boys who were going to throw the white boys off the train, but most of their opposition had jumped off the train by the time he got to the right car.

Soon afterward, the train was stopped and Powell was arrested, along with eight other African American boys he didn't know. He was tried before Judge A. Alabama, U. At Haywood Patterson's third trial at the end of , Ozie Powell's testimony was confused and contradictory. After a tough cross-examination, defense attorney Leibowitz asked him how much schooling he had had in his life.

Patterson was convicted, but the decision was again overturned by the Supreme Court of the United States, this time on grounds that the absence of black jury members denied the defendants equal protection under the law, as required by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Patterson was tried and convicted again in January of Following the swift group conviction days after the incident, Ozie Powell had been imprisoned without a retrial for five years.

While being transported from Patterson's trial back to the Birmingham Jail, he pulled out a pocketknife and slashed Deputy Edgar Blalock in the throat. Sheriff J.

Street Sandlin stopped the car, pulled out his gun and shot Powell in the head. Blalock was out of the hospital the same day with ten stitches. Remarkably, Powell also survived. His mother visited him in the hospital while Powell recovered. When asked why, he replied, "Cause I feel like everybody in Alabama is down on me and is mad with me. In January Dr. Branche examined the Scottsboro defendants and reported that Powell like Roberson had an IQ of about 64 and a mental age of nine.

A Life magazine story on the defendants stated that Powell "can barely spell out words. Nobody writes to him. In July of Powell pleaded guilty to assault and was sentenced to 20 years. Leibowitz requested that the six years already served be taken into account, but Judge Callahan, noting that the rape charge had been dropped against Powell, gave him the maximum sentence.

He was sent to Atmore, the prison for dangerous criminals known as "the murderers' home. Graves decided against granting clemency. These people make wise cracks talking about somebody in Alabama to defend us, say I would get out better.

They won't let the New York people come around. His father walked out a month after his birth and his mother died when he was two. Willie was raised by his grandmother until her death in Although he made it through to seventh grade in Atlanta, a doctor later measured Roberson's IQ to be about 64, and his mental age at nine.

He could not read or write and had difficulty speaking, and was the butt of many courtroom spectators' jokes. Roberson had boarded the Southern Railroad headed to Memphis in search of free medical care for his syphilis and gonorrhea. He was in pain and lying in a car near the back of the train when he was arrested along with the 8 other African American teenagers accused of rape. The cane he used to walk with was thrown away on orders of the deputy that took him into custody.

This painful, syphilitic condition was evidence to defense attorney Samuel Leibowitz that Roberson could not have committed this crime. Judge James Horton agreed that it was unlikely that Roberson could have jumped from car to car as Victoria Price claimed. However, when it was revealed that Ruby Bates had been treated for syphilis herself, Roberson's venereal disease was cited as evidence of his guilt.

Horribly, he was not treated for his condition until Roberson was one of the defendants released in July of , after six years without a retrial.

Upon his release, Roberson said he wanted to become an airplane mechanic. After a brief foray into show business, Roberson settled into steady work in New York City. Having reviewed the evidence and met privately with one of the medical examiners, Judge Horton suspended the death sentence and granted Patterson a new trial. The judge would be rewarded for this brave action by losing his bid for reelection the following year. Prosecutors got the cases in front of a more sympathetic judge, and both Patterson and Norris were retried, convicted and sentenced to death in late Supreme Court.

In January , the Supreme Court again overturned the guilty verdicts, ruling in Norris v. This second landmark decision in the Scottsboro Boys case would help integrate future juries across the nation. Early in , Patterson was convicted for a fourth time, but sentenced to 75 years in prison. The day after the verdict, Ozie Powell was shot in the head after attacking a deputy sheriff with a knife; both men survived.

Through negotiations with the defense, prosecutors agreed to drop rape charges against Powell, but he was convicted of assaulting the deputy sheriff and sentenced to 20 years. They also dropped rape charges against the four remaining defendants—Montgomery, Roberson, Williams and Leroy Wright—and all four were released.

Convicted of manslaughter after a barroom brawl in , Patterson died of cancer in Clarence Norris, who received a pardon from Governor George Wallace of Alabama in , would outlive all of the other Scottsboro Boys, dying in at the age of In , the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles voted unanimously to issue posthumous pardons to Patterson, Weems and Andy Wright, bringing a long-overdue end to one of the most notorious cases of racial injustice in U.

But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. The details of their skirmish with a group of white men and two women on the train are still unclear.