An American Tragedy: The Hawaiian Scottsboro Boys
In his book, “A Death in the Islands – The Unwritten Law and the Last Trial of Clarence Darrow,” Mike Farris recounts in vivid detail a miscarriage of justice in early 1930s Hawaii that echoes an all-too-familiar American theme. We learn that several men, collectively known as the Ala Moana Boys, were the Hawaiian equivalent of their more notorious black contemporaries, the Scottsboro Boys of Alabama, who themselves became shorthand for the kind of racist eruptions punctuating our history manifested in episodes such as the Emmet Till murder, and the Rosewood, Florida, and Tulsa, Oklahoma massacres. The same forces aligned against the Scottsboro Boys ineluctably targeted the …show more content…
Agnes Peeples, a kanaka (native Hawaiian) woman, and Homer Peeples, her haole (white) husband, were in their car that night headed to a restaurant when they nearly collided with the Ala Moana Boys car at the intersection of King and Liliha Streets. Emotions quickly escalated and Ms. Peeples and Joe Kahahawai came to blows on the road where the collision almost occurred. The confrontation was brief and neither combatant was severely injured. But, of critical importance to the Ala Moana Boys, was that all three sets of characters came together as soon as Agnes reported her fight with Joe to Honolulu PD; at that juncture, as Thalia’s reported assault and rape was crackling over police radios, the two incidents became conflated. The Ala Moana Boys thus became prime suspects in the contemporaneous alleged assault and rape of Thalia.
The die was now cast; the focus of police investigation and concern was not a fight between two Hawaiians, but the assault and rape of a haole woman by kanaka men. In 1930s Hawaii, the racial tension between whites and Hawaiians was omnipresent. The Massie case had to be solved quickly, and justice swiftly meted out. That imperative informed all that happened subsequently to the Ala Moana Boys in the Hawaiian criminal justice …show more content…
Some in the jury no doubt found Thalia’s tale incredible, especially when they learned from witness testimony and documentary evidence how her story evolved so dramatically over a short period, and how none of the medical personnel (both civilian and military) and police investigators who examined her found any evidence of trauma to her genital area that would be expected in a gang