On March 25, 1931, two white women accused nine black men of raping them in the town of Paint Rock, Alabama. Taking place in the segregated South, this claim caused outrage to spread all throughout Alabama and the South, and the nine black men immediately became scapegoats.
 
An important figure of these trials that is often forgotten is Judge James Horton from Athens, Alabama, who was the presiding judge at the retrial of Haywood Patterson. The nine black men were all found guilty upon completion of their trials in Scottsboro; however, the Supreme Court agreed that they could not be tried fairly in Scottsboro and moved the trials to Decatur. This is how the trials ended up taking place in Judge Horton’s court. 

In June 1964 civil rights activists mobilized a ten-week crusade to register African American voters in Mississippi, garnering support from more than 800 university students, the majority of whom were white. While fact-checking the details of the Freedom Summer for Stephen Goldfarb’s upcoming book review, I encountered numerous references to songs and spirituals and their essential role in the events of this particular campaign as well as the entire arc of the civil rights movement.