Word: scottsboro
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...mass defections came as a surprise to the A.C.L.U. leadership. Founded in 1920, it has defended rights to freedom of speech and assembly on behalf of fascists and Ku Klux Klanners, as well as underdogs like Sacco and Vanzetti, the "Scottsboro boys" and conscientious objectors in World War II. Though consistently the country's foremost protector of the Bill of Rights, the A.C.L.U. had acquired only 60,000 members by 1960. Its period of large growth came in the late '60s and early '70s, when civil rights and liberties became a popular cause and thousands of young...
DIED. Samuel Simon Leibowitz, 84, theatrical, quick-tongued lawyer who won the release of the "Scottsboro Boys," nine black Alabama youths convicted of raping two white women; of a stroke; in Brooklyn. The Rumanian-born lawyer won a reputation during the Prohibition era for his brilliant defense of such notorious criminals as Al Capone, the Mad Dog Killer, and the Bread Knife Murderess-he saved all but one of his 100 or so murder defendants from the electric chair. In 1933 Leibowitz, serving without a fee, took on the Scottsboro Boys, eight of whom had been sentenced to death. After...
Another famous verdict of the 1930s was reversed-and officially so-when Alabama Governor George Wallace signed a full pardon for Clarence Norris, 64, believed to be the last survivor of the "Scottsboro Boys." Norris was 19 when he and eight other black youths were hauled off a freight train, prosecuted for raping two white women and quickly sentenced to death. It was a verdict that aroused worldwide protest and involved years of appeals. After five years on death row, Norris was reprieved, served another ten years in prison, won a parole, then fled to New York, where...
Died. Shad Polier, 70, South Carolina-born white civil rights lawyer, who won prominence in 1931 by joining the defense team that waged a long, ultimately successful fight to save the lives of the nine black defendants in the landmark Scottsboro case, which established that blacks could no longer be excluded from juries; of an apparent heart attack; in Manhattan...
Hard Egg. Having set that inquiry in motion, Dees hurried over to Tarboro, N.C., where three young black men, known as the Tarboro Boys, are charged with the 1973 rape of a white woman, raising echoes of the infamous Scottsboro Boys case in the '30s. The defendants claim that their victim consented; she denies it. Convicted and condemned to death, the three won a reversal on technical grounds. Last week they were supposed to face the same charges again, but the trial was postponed until next month...