Today in Labor History March 25, 1931: The authorities arrested the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama and charged them with rape. The Scottsboro Boys were nine African American youths, ages 13 to 20, falsely accused of raping two white women. A lynch mob tried to murder them before they had even been indicted. All-white juries convicted each of them. Several judges gave death sentences, a common practice in Alabama at the time for black men convicted of raping white women. The Communist Party and the NAACP fought to get the cases appealed and retried. Finally, after numerous retrials and years in harsh prisons, four of the Scottsboro Boys were acquitted and released. The other five were got sentences ranging from 75 years to death. All were released or escaped by 1946. Poet and playwright Langston Hughes wrote it in his work Scottsboro Limited. And Richard Wright's 1940 novel Native Son was influenced by the case.
Long Division, by Kiese Laymon.
You are one, or maybe two, Black teens named City, living with your Grandma in Alabama, when you find a book (or maybe two) with no author, called Long Division, which when you read it is sort of about your life but not the one you thought you were living.
4 of 5 library cats 🐈 🐈 🐈 🐈. @bookstodon#bookstodon#reading#books#alabama
Today in Labor History August 30, 1813: The Fort Mims massacre took place during the Creek War. The Red Sticks faction of the Creek Nation, under the command of head warriors Peter McQueen and William Weatherford, stormed Fort Mims and defeated the militia garrison. Afterward, they massacred nearly all the remaining Creek métis, white settlers, and militia at the fort. Their victory spread panic throughout the Southeast. Settlers fled. Thousands of whites fled their settlements for Mobile, which struggled to accommodate them. The Red Stick victory was one of the greatest Native American victories. They were facilitated by the fact that Federal troops were bogged down at the northern front of the War of 1812. However, local state militias, commanded by Major General Andrew Jackson and allied with Cherokees, ultimately defeated the Red Sticks Creek faction at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, ending the Creek War.
The Fort Mims massacre is cited in Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell. Grandma Fontaine shares her memories of seeing her entire family murdered in the Creek uprising following the massacre as a lesson to Scarlett.