Letter from Benjamin J. Davis to Samuel Leibowitz

In March 1931, a fight broke out between two groups of young hoboes—one white, one Black—who were riding on a freight train in northern Alabama. Also on the train were two white women who at some point engaged in sexual activity. Details remain hazy to this day, but by the time the train reached Paint Rock, Alabama, the Black teenagers were falsely accused of rape, arrested, and thrown in jail in the nearby town of Scottsboro. The nine teenagers came to be referred to as the Scottsboro Boys, and over the next two decades, they also became symbolic of the endemic racism of the southern Jim Crow justice system. The communist International Labor Defense group (ILD), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) combined forces into what became the Scottsboro Defense Fund.