THEY MUST NOT DIE: STORY OF SCOTTSBORO

On 25 March 1931, nine Black boys in Alabama, USA were wrongly charged with rap*ng White woman. They were initially sentenced to death, but this was overturned and retrials were ordered - sparking a mass (nationwide and global) campaign under the banner ‘They Must Not Die!’ aimed at preventing a legal lynching of the so-called Scottsboro Boys.

The case also reminds us of George Stinney Jr, executed in 1944, accused of k*lling two White girls, and Emmet Till, lynched in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a White woman, who later admitted the accusation was a lie.

It was a pivotal moment in Black history in the United States 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 global reach of the case was so far 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 was 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 k*lling 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.