Caption from poster__

Huntsville Times

"DEATH PENALTY PROPERLY DEMANDED IN

  FIENDISH CRIME OF NINE BURLY NEGROES."

No crime in American history-- let alone a crime that
never occurred-- produced as many trials, convictions,
reversals, and retrials as did an alleged gang rape
of two white girls by nine black teenagers on a
Southern Railroad freight run on March 25, 1931.
 Over the course of the two decades that followed,
the struggle for justice of the "Scottsboro Boys," as
the black teens were called, made celebrities out of
anonymities, launched and ended careers, wasted lives,
 produced heroes, opened southern juries to blacks,
 exacerbated sectional strife, and divided America's
 political left.

The case of the Scottsboro Boys arose in Scottsboro, Alabama during the 1930s, when nine black youths ranging in age from thirteen to nineteen, were accused of raping two white women, one of whom would later recant. The boys were convicted and sentenced to death by all-white juries despite the weak and contradictory testimonies of the witnesses. The death sentences, originally scheduled to be carried out quickly, were postponed pending appeals that took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the sentences were overturned.