Media's Role In The Scottsboro Trial

From the very beginning, the media played a very prominent role in the Scottsboro trials. This media involvement served to exacerbate multiple divisions at play in the trial. The newspapers drew heavily on racial divisions starting at the first trial by emphasizing the racial difference between the alleged criminals and their victims. They also ran with the line that it was up to the white men of the south to save the honor of these victims by handing out the death penalty. This served in stirring up a mob by immediately condemning nine Scottsboro boys. A lunchroom proprieter went as far to claim that “there shouldn’t be any trial for those d*** n******….. rope would do the work and wouldn’t cost the county much” (Linder). The mob stirred up by the papers over racial divisions would heavily influence a couple of the judges and juries in the following trials.
They used their papers and resources to make the Scottsboro case a national issue, claiming that they “made” the Scottsboro case (PBS, 2000). The International Labor Defense was the legal arm of the Communist Party. The South generally hated Communism and the ILD ruthlessly antagonized the region with insults such as “lyncher boss” and accusations that the courts were “instruments of national and class oppression” (Page 138). It was these lines that created the South’s mentality that outsiders were trying to rule