Scottsboro case summary
Did the scottsboro boys get executed.
Ruby Bates was, like Victoria Price, a poor Huntsville millworker who became one of the two accusers of the Scottsboro Boys. But, unlike Price, Bates later recanted her story of rape aboard a Chattanooga to Memphis freight train, and went on to actively campaign for the release of the jailed black defendants.
Who accused the scottsboro boys
Bates had a tough childhood. Her mother was a prostitute. Her father was a shiftless drunk who would beat her, her mother, and her siblings. When her father was jailed for horse-whipping her brother, the family left and began to move from one northern Alabama town to another before settling in Huntsville, where, at age fifteen, Ruby took a job in the Margaret cotton mill.
Bates lived with her family in an unpainted wooden shack in worst part of Huntsville. Her family was the only white family on the block. Contrary to popular belief, segregation did not reach to the lower rungs of southern society, and Ruby lived, played, and slept with blacks.
Bates
