On March 31, 1931, nine young African Americans were indicted in Scottsboro, Alabama, on charges of having raped two white girls on a railroad freight car. Doctors who examined the girls after the alleged crime said that no rape occurred. Despite that evidence, eight of the nine boys were convicted and sentenced to death by the state court. The U.S. Supreme Court in Powell v. Alabama (1932) and Norris v. Alabama (1935) reversed convictions and death sentences obtained in the local courts -- in the first instance, because the defendants had not been given adequate counsel, and in the second instance, because blacks had been excluded from the juries.

Nevertheless, further prosecutions in the case continued in Alabama between 1935 and 1937. Four of the defendants were again convicted and were sentenced to lengthy prison terms. Charges against the remaining five were dropped. Andy Wright was the last to be released from jail, in 1950; 19 years, two months and 15 days since he spent his first night in jail. The alleged leader of the group, Heywood Patterson, escaped from jail in 1948, making his way to the Midwestern state of Michigan where there was no legally mandated segregation. The governor of Michigan refused to extradite him back to Alabama. Patterson's book, Scottsboro Boy, was published while he was a fugitive. He died of cancer in 1952 at the age of 39.

Ozzie Powell and Clarence Norris, whose names appeared in the two landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions, were both paroled from prison in 1946. Thirty years later, Norris sought and obtained an unconditional pardon from then-Alabama Governor George C. Wallace. Wallace had previously favored the state's segregation laws, but by the 1970s, legally mandated segregation had been crushed in Alabama and the governor was seeking to make amends for past wrongs. In 1979, Norris published his own book about his ordeal titled, The Last of the Scottsboro Boys. He died in 1989, the last surviving Scottsboro Boy.

The Scottsboro Boys were championed by widely disparate groups in the 1930s, including the American Communist Party and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the nation's oldest civil rights organization. But the eventual freedom of most of the defendants was mainly the result of the work of the Scottsboro Defense Committee, an umbrella group dominated by Americans of all colors. The demonstrations and rallies that were staged in support of the Scottsboro Boys are viewed by historians as a significant precursor of the modern U.S. civil rights movement that began in the early 1950s. The U.S. Supreme Court decisions that were issued as a result of the case are considered landmark rulings that significantly expanded fundamental rights for African Americans; indeed, for all Americans.

Driving into Scottsboro today -- seven decades later -- there is no hint of the inflexible segregation that must have seemed inviolable in the early 1930s. The town's mayor, Ron Bailey, wants visitors to know that Scottsboro, a community of only about 15,000 people, is a very different place today than it was then. "Our town is fully integrated now; the largest percentage of our population wasn't even born when the first trials took place here," he says. "You must judge the events of 1931 in the context of the predominant mores of that time," he adds. "In 1931, there were still people living in this town who personally remembered the Civil War. Alabama recovered much more slowly than did other parts of the South, economically and otherwise.

"It is important to remember what happened in this town in 1931, but it could have happened in many places at that time," notes Bailey. "Scottsboro has changed since then and so has the South. The Scottsboro of today is progressive in terms of race. We probably have a greater percentage of interracial dating and marriages than anywhere else in Alabama. And today, our town is no longer just black and white, but multiracial. We have a growing percentage of Asians and Hispanics, for example. Race relations in Scottsboro are now much like they are in other parts of America. Things are not perfect here, but we've come a long way."