THEY MUST NOT DIE: STORY OF SCOTTSBORO

On March 25th, 1931, nine Black boys in Alabama, USA were falsely charged with r*ping a White woman. They would then be sentenced to death. Labelled a legal case of lynching, this case, known as the Scottsboro Boys case, blew up across the country and the world as a major part of the early Civil Rights Struggle.

The Scottsboro Boys case was a pivotal moment in Black history in the United States that had rippling effects that would impact generations to come. The international struggle to free the Scottsboro Boys led to the largest resistance movement against racism in the US justice system in history. The international impact of the Scottsboro case was so far reaching that a Sedition Bill was passed in Ghana (then the British colony of the Gold Coast) to prevent Africans from agitating in support of the Scottsboro Boys.

While the case did officially bring about certain legal reforms to the carceral system, such as mandating the presence of Black jurors in cases with Black defendants, this would often go unenforced throughout the 20th century and into the present. In one example, Black revolutionary Assata Shakur would go on to be sentenced to life in prison by an all-White jury. In 1986, a court ruled that race could not be used as a factor in the initial establishment of a jury pool. In 2021, there were two high-profile cases in which nearly all-White juries acquitted White men for shooting and killing Black men - the murders of Jake Blake and Ahmaud Arbery.

Africans in the United States and throughout the diaspora continue to struggle against a racist criminal justice system in which they are disproportionally incarcerated.