-
Fight breaks out between white and black young men who are riding as hoboes on a Southern Railroad freight train. Nine black boys charged with assult.
-
Rape charges are added from white women Victoria Price and Ruby Bates.
-
lynch mob gathers outside the Scottsboro jail
-
all-white grand jury indicts "Scottsboro boys" of rape
-
All nine plead "not guilty."
-
Trial Begins
-
Clarence Norris, Charlie Weems, Haywood Patterson, Olen Montgomery, Ozie Powell, Willie Roberson, Eugene Williams and Andy Wright are tried, convicted and sentenced to death by electrocution.
-
boys choose the International Labor Defense (ILD) to handle their appeal
-
announces it will hear the Scottsboro cases
-
pended their appeal
-
U.S. Supreme Court reverses the convictions, violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The cases are remanded to the lower court. New trials held again
-
Ruby Bates confessed that no rape occured and that she was with Victoria Price on the trian. Dr. Bridges found that there were no signs of rape by nine men
-
Leibowitz argues that blacks had been excluded from the Scottsboro jury
-
The Fourteenth Amendment deprives black defendants of their rights to equal protection under the law
-
Ozie Powell attacks a deputy sheriff, gets shot in the head but lives
-
Alabama Attorney General Thomas Knight meets secretly with Samuel Leibowitz, Knight offers to drop the charges against three of the boys and offers the other three a sentence of no more than ten years
-
Norris is convicted of rape and sentenced to death, Wright is convicted and sentenced to 99 years, Weems is convicted and sentenced to 75 years, Ozie Powell sentenced to 20 years, Roy Wright and Eugene Williams are dropped, charges against Olen Montgomery and Willie Roberson are also dropped.
-
The Alabama Supreme Court upholds the death sentence for Clarence Norris, but Governor Graves reduces Clarence Norris's death sentence to life in prison, Norris was the last Scottsboro boy to die in 1989
