Infamous 1931 miscarriage of justice close to being reversed as state government considers law to allow for pardon
Sheila Washington vividly recalls the day she first learned about the terrible events that occurred in her small town in Alabama almost three decades before she was born. She was 17 years old and, rooting around for something beneath her bed, she discovered a dusty old book that bore the town's name in its title.
Scottsboro Boy was a memoir by Haywood Patterson, one of nine young black boys who in 1931 became entangled in one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice of the Jim Crow era. Wrongfully accused of raping two white girls, the nine came close to being lynched by an angry mob, were rushed to trial in front of an all-white jury, and ended up serving many years in jail, eight of them on death row.
Yet young Sheila Washington had...
Sheila Washington vividly recalls the day she first learned about the terrible events that occurred in her small town in Alabama almost three decades before she was born. She was 17 years old and, rooting around for something beneath her bed, she discovered a dusty old book that bore the town's name in its title.
Scottsboro Boy was a memoir by Haywood Patterson, one of nine young black boys who in 1931 became entangled in one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice of the Jim Crow era. Wrongfully accused of raping two white girls, the nine came close to being lynched by an angry mob, were rushed to trial in front of an all-white jury, and ended up serving many years in jail, eight of them on death row.
Yet young Sheila Washington had...
- 4/4/2013
- by Ed Pilkington
- The Guardian - Film News
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