Scottsboro Trial Case Study

Improved Essays
In the report on the Scottsboro trials case, that Miss Hollace Ransdall’s created, there was an unfair trial with an unfair result, both of which were not fair to the negroes. Firstly, the two girls stated that they spent the night at Mrs. Brochie’s house. However, in the investigation failed to discover Miss Brochie or the house that she lived in. This is irrelevant to the story but it does immediately give Victoria a reputation. It tells the judge right from the beginning, that there is a very great chance she is a liar. When you already have a reputation, it makes it harder to believe anything else that Victoria says. Secondly, Victoria also said that there were twelve negroes, however the negroes stated that there were actually 15 of them.

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Additionally, in this trial, the implications of an elected versus appointed judge can be seen. Judge Horton did the right thing by overturning the conviction of Haywood Patterson, he did so at great risk. Horton, an elected judge, basically ended his career with this move. It is this situation that leads me to believe that judges should be appointed rather than elected. Not every judge, especially when put in a situation like this, would have the integrity to ignore the political ramifications of their decision.…

    • 933 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    The Scottsboro Trial was when two white girls accused 9 black teenagers of rape on the Southern Railroad freight run from Chattanooga to Memphis (Kinding).This crime occurred on March 25,1931.The Salem Witch Trial occurred in 1692 and 1693 200 people were accused of witchcraft,witchcraft was very hysteria. It was started by a group of young girls,innocent people lives were taken. During,the Salem Witch Trial,people were excuted of being witches,Scottsboro Trial,9 innocent black teenagers were accused of rape upon 2 white teen girls.…

    • 328 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Before the case began, the whites sat in the middle of the courthouse square while the blacks sat in the corner with Mr. Dolphus Raymond. Heck Tate, Mr. Ewell, Mayella Ewell, and Tom Robinson testify while Mr. Gilmer is the circuit Solicitor and Atticus defends Tom Robinson. In the end, Tom is guilty and when Atticus passes, the colored balcony of people stand. The town has mixed feelings of the jury’s decision. In this journal, I will be predicting the verdict of the case and evaluating the motive of why Mr. Ewell would lie.…

    • 1298 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The evidence of story of the blacks was told mostly by white people, this creates a dimension separating the reads from the immediate emotions and struggles. One may argue that she is trying to view the white 's perspective on the reconstruction period. However, direct struggles from the one oppressed in their own words would have increased my trust in the validity of the sources. I picked up on a change of tone when she was talking about white on black rape, she criminalized the white, but when mentioned in the beginning about black men committing rape on white women it was more relaxed. This is shown in "As a part of their violent rampages, Klansmen also assaulted and raped black women" pg. 409.…

    • 1071 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Lee creates a trial between white teenager Mayella Ewell and how she is accusing a black man, Tom Robinson of rape. Besides the Ewells saying Tom raped her, there was more proof that he didn’t do it. Due to the unjust jury, Tom Robinson was found guilty. The trial takes place in the 1930’s, in the center of Maycomb and with everyone from the town coming to see (Lee 222-283). The Ewells versus Robinson trial is a parallel to another trial happening at a similar time, The Trial of the “Scottboro Boys”.…

    • 1734 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim” (Wiesel). A true statement made by Elie Wiesel, one of the survivors of the holocaust, he decided to tell the world what happened, he decided not to become a bystander because silence can never help the victim. The consequences of silence can be seen everywhere but in the fictional story “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson and the non-fictional story the “Ruling in the Scottsboro Trial” by Judge James E. Horton we can clearly see how silence made a huge difference in someone else’s life and in Elie Wiesel's nobel prize acceptance speech we can appreciate how silence can make you guilty. We can not be innocent if we are bystanders, we have to speak for those who stay silent, it is our…

    • 621 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    When a group of nine unemployed African American men were traveling on the same train in search of jobs, they did not know that their lives would be changed forever. These young men, widely known as the “Scottsboro Boys”, left the train falsely accused of raping two white women. This tragic case became a significant symbol in American history, and an accurate representation of American injustice during the time period of the Great Depression. Although there was very weak evidence that supported a guilty verdict, the Scottsboro Boys were not given a fair trial. Due to societal circumstances at the time, fair trials between African Americans and whites in the United States were almost unheard of.…

    • 583 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    White people were seen as superior over blacks. Racial discrimination in society, the jury, and people involved during 1930’s Alabama affected the Scottsboro Boys Trial. Alabama during the 1930’s was heavily immersed in racism. The trial was whites accusing blacks of sexual assault, something common in those days. In the PBS article it states,“ The women who had had sexual relations with some of the white men thrown off the train and fearing prosecution for their sexual activity with the white men agreed to testify against the black youths”(www.pbs.org).White people were very bias towards blacks.…

    • 624 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Many academics equate the roots of To Kill a Mockingbird to the famous Scottsboro Trail, in which nine black boys were accused of raping two white women on a train in the early 1930’s (Taylor). This would make sense considering Lee would have been close to the same age as Scout at the time, and the case originated in her own state of Alabama. However, there is another case that could have impacted her even more. Author Charles Shields said in his book Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, which was quoted by Art Taylor in his article, that a different indecent involving the rape of a white woman by a black man occurred in Lee’s hometown, and was likely to affect the author on a deeper level. Whether this was true for Lee or not, there are other ties to her hometown in her…

    • 970 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Before the story has begun, the African American is already accused of raping a white, nineteen year old Mayella Ewell. Many townspeople of Maycomb believe that Robinson is not responsible for his crime because he is a hard-working and well-respected man. On the other hand, they disrespect and distrust the prosecutor, Mayella Ewell, because she belongs to a poor, disgraceful “white trash” family who lives by the town’s dump. The second evidence that proves Tom Robinson’s innocence is found in Mr. Ewell’s testimony on the rape. Mr. Ewell, Mayella’s father and one of the witnesses of the incident, tells Atticus, the lawyer of Tom Robinson, that he does not call a doctor for Mayella on that day.…

    • 1267 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Scottsboro Trial Essay

    • 825 Words
    • 4 Pages

    The way that the Scottsboro trials were handled by the Alabama court system, and the repeated wrongful convictions of the defendants in the face of exonerating evidence, is a prime manifestation of the way that racism worked in the South of the Jim Crow era. Racism is possibly the biggest factor behind the accusation of rape and the mishandling of the case. At the same time however, class differences also provided a motive for some of the actions of the people involved in the case. Ruby Bates and Victoria Price may have found some motivation to accuse the boys to avoid being arrested as hoboes or prostitutes, but once the trials began they were treated better than they had ever been before, and their new, more comfortable life gave them…

    • 825 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    I remember when the Scottsboro trial, it all started in 1831 during the Great Depression when nine boys were accused of rape. At the time not all nine boys knew each other nor were they together. These boys, Haywood Patterson (18),Charlie Weems (20), Ozie Powell (16), Clarence Norris (19), Olem Montgomery (17),Willie Roberson (17), Eugene Williams(13), Andrew (18) and Leroy Wright (12) illegally hopped on a train looking for work, they were taken off the train in Scottsboro where they were given a minor charge. After they were charged the deputies saw two white ladies Ruby Bates (17) and Victoria Price (21) and pressured them into accusing the nine innocent black boys of raping them, taking them to court (blackpast.org). When the court was…

    • 1017 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Mayella is in a trial up against a black male, Tom Robinson, who she accused of trying to rape her. They were also caught by Mr. Ewell, Mayella's father. Therefore, Tom Robinson has little to no chance of winning the case based off class, gender, and race especially…

    • 761 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the article Scottsboro Boys and To Kill a Mockingbird: Two Trials for the Classroom it stated that, “The lessons of the infamous 1930s Scottsboro Boys case in which two young white women wrongfully accused nine African American youths of rape illustrate through fact what Harper Lee tried to instruct through her fiction”. Black people were always accused from white people and the judge will always believe the white race, they were considered criminals, barbarians and savage. Also in the article “To Kill a Mockingbird”: Two Trials for the Classroom it stated that, “Both historical and fictional trials express the courage required to stand up for the Constitutional principle providing for equal justice to all under the law.” This quote shows that in the fictional story displayed the injustice that black people…

    • 766 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the movie, A Time to Kill, the main character Jake Brigance who is an attorney in the state of Mississippi describes the danger he faces when he takes on a murder case. During this period, there was still racial tension between whites and African-Americans in the state of Mississippi. The murder case that Brigance takes on involves two Caucasian men who were murdered by an African-American named, Carl Lee Hailey. Hailey murders the two white men because they raped and assaulted his 10-year-old daughter, Tanya Hailey. In the movie, Brigance is threatened by community members to drop the murder case.…

    • 1316 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays