Arrests and Accusations
On March 25, 1931, on the Southern Railway line between Chattanooga and Memphis. nine black youths were "hoboing" on a freight train with several white males and two white women.
A fight began between the white and black groups near the Lookout Mountain tunnel, and the whites were kicked off the train. The train was searched by a posse in Paint Rock, Alabama where they were ordered to "capture every Negro on the train". The posse arrested the black boys for assault.
The boys arrested were Olen Montgomery (age 17), Clarence Norris (age 19), Haywood Patterson (age 18), Ozie Powell (age 16), Willie Roberson (age 16), Charlie Weems (age 16), Eugene Williams (age 13), and brothers Andy (age 19) and Roy Wright (age 12).
The posse came across Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, who said they had been raped by the black boys. A doctor examined the white women. A widely shown photo displays the two women shortly after the arrests in 1931.
Read more about this topic: Scottsboro Boys
Famous quotes containing the words arrests and/or accusations:
“On our streets it is the sight of a totally unknown face or figure which arrests the attention, rather than, as in big cities, the strangeness of occasionally seeing someone you know.”
—For the State of Vermont, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“This might be the end of the world. If Joe lost we were back in slavery and beyond help. It would all be true, the accusations that we were lower types of human beings. Only a little higher than apes. True that we were stupid and ugly and lazy and dirty and, unlucky and worst of all, that God Himself hated us and ordained us to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, forever and ever, world without end.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)