American Civil Rights Movement: The Legal System in the South


Figure 1.--One of the most well publicized incidents of how flimsy or false testimony and eevidence was used against blacks was, even boys and youths, was Scottsboro Boys in Alabama. This photograph was taken in 1935. Here the Scottsboro boys are pictured with their lawyer, the renounded defense counsel Samuel Lebowitz.

Jim Crow laws not only seggregated blacks and white in the South, but by denying blacks the vote, they denied many basic rights as citizens. The most apparent was fair treatment in the legal system. Local sheriffs and deputies were often Klan members. There were no black judges and blacks were not allowed to sit on jurries which were normally drawn from voting registers. Blacks not lynched faced very severe judgements in the courts. Those found guilty on often trumped up charges faced confinement in farm labor camps. Some times the county or state hired them out to local farmers or contractors--another form of slavery. One of the most well publicized incidents of how flimsy or false testimony and evidence was used against blacks was, even boys and youths, was Scottsboro Boys in Alabama. Nine youths were accused of raping two white women on a train. Here it was the Communist Party who came to the aid of the boys. Many judged the NAACP's response as feeble. [Janken] They were saved in large measure by renounded defense counsel Samuel Lebowitz. Confronted by the most obvious raw racist procecutors and judges and all white juries, Lebowitz in effect put Alabama justice on trial and exposed it to national scrutiny, winning repeated reversals from the Supreme Court.

Sources

Janken, Kennth Robert. White: The Biography of Walter White Mr. NAACP (New Press), 477p.







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Created: January 3, 2003
Last updated: June 18, 2003