Montgomery Bus Boycott and Scottsboro trials

On December 1, 1955, Parks took her seat in the front of the "colored section" of a Montgomery bus. When the driver asked Parks and three other black riders to relinquish their seats to whites, Parks refused (the others complied. The driver called the police, and Parks was arrested. That night she was released on a $100 bond. Her actions sparked the start of Civil Rights Movement. On the evening of December 5, several thousand protesters crowded into the Holt Street Baptist Church to create the Montgomery Improvement Association. What was planned as a day-long bus boycott swelled to 381 days when the District Court ruled declaring segregated seating on buses unconstitutional, a decision later upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Scottsboro trials

The case was first heard in Scottsboro, Alabama in three rushed trials, where the defendants received poor legal representation. All but the twelve-year-old Roy Wright were convicted of rape and all but him were sentenced to death, the common sentence in accusations of rape by white women against black men in Alabama at the time. But with help from the NAACP and the American Communist Party, the case was appealed. The Alabama Supreme Court affirmed seven of the eight convictions, and granted thirteen year old Eugene Williams a new trial because he was a juvenile. Chief Justice John C. Anderson dissented however, ruling that the defendants had been denied an impartial jury, fair trial, fair sentencing, and effective counsel.

The case was returned to the lower court and the Judge allowed a change of venue, moving the retrials to Decatur, Alabama—fifty miles from the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. Judge Callahan was appointed. During the retrials, one of the alleged victims admitted fabricating the rape story and asserted that none of the Scottsboro Boys ever touched either of the white women. The jury found them guilty, but the judge set aside the verdict and granted a new trial. After a new series of trials the verdict was the same: guilty. The cases were ultimately tried three times. For the third time a jury—now with one black member—returned a third guilty verdict. Charges were finally dropped for 4 of the 9 defendants. Sentences for the rest ranged from 75 years to death. All but 2 served prison sentences. One was shot in prison by a guard. Two escaped, reoffended, and were sent back to prison. Clarence Norris, the oldest defendant and the only one sentenced to death, was pardoned by George Wallace in 1976 and wrote a book about his experiences. The last surviving defendant died in 1989.

b)An important plot element concerns the father, attorney Atticus Finch, defending a black man against charges of rape. The Tom Robinson trial of "To Kill a Mockingbird" is based on the Scottsboro case. Both trials were about the blacks being misjudged of raping white woman when that did not really happen. However, the blacks it the both cases had no bad ending.

c) These trials are similar as in the fact that they earned much support from the black in the public, from most of the place. Also, the blacks who were accused of the crimes were all in the end, had their name cleared but went through a lot of trouble before they cleared it as the whites were still discriminated against the black and they tried all their best to