Scottsboro Boys Museum and Cultural Center dir. by Sheila Washington (review)

On March 25, 1931, nine African-American youth, ages thirteen to twenty, traveled on the Southern Railway through Tennessee from Chattanooga to Memphis. After being accused of raping two white female millworkers from Huntsville, Alabama, while en route to Memphis, the boys—Roy Wright, Andy Wright, Eugene Williams, and Haywood Patterson of Chattanooga, and Ozie Powell, Clarence Norris, Olen Montgomery, Charlie Weems, and Willie Roberson of Georgia—were detained near Scottsboro, Alabama. Within two weeks of their arrest, eight of the youth were sentenced to death by presiding Judge Alfred E. Hawkins; the all-white jury rejected the prosecution's recommended verdict for the ninth, thirteen-year-old Roy Wright, because of his young age. With the International Legal Defense's (ILD) financial support and attorney staff, the case of these "Scottsboro Boys," as they came to be known, helped expose the pervasiveness of racial prejudice and legal injustice in the United States, mobilizing national and international advocates for civil rights during the 1930s. The ILD successfully challenged the death sentence by reversing or changing the verdict. It wasn't until recently that the Scottsboro Boys Museum and Cultural Center began telling their story.

Many tourists travel to the small town of Scottsboro today to visit the unique attraction of the Unclaimed Baggage Center. A block away, tourists may visit a site that reclaims the historical baggage of the nation's racial past. Built in 1904, one of the first African American churches in Scottsboro is now the home of the Scottsboro Boys Museum and Cultural Center. During the trial, the church served as a meeting place for the Scottsboro Boys' defense team. The railroad behind the church brought the boys to the town that gave the trial and the boys their name. Haywood Patterson's 1950 memoir Scottsboro Boy introduced museum founder and director Sheila Washington to the town's unclaimed history. Washington's relentless efforts to institutionalize this important part of local public history was met with significant resistance from local authorities who rejected the idea of a museum in 2001. Financial assistance from the family of the boys' lead defense attorney, Samuel Leibowitz, made the opening of the nonprofit museum in February of 2010 possible. The city currently does not provide funding for the museum's exhibitions or its programming.

Visitors enter the museum through the main church lobby. The chapel's original furniture frames the significance of the building as part of the historical narrative it seeks to preserve. Visitors will not find fancy interactive or audio display cases in this museum. Nor will patrons be presented with fleshed-out historical plaques that guide their historical understanding of the Scottsboro trials. Instead, this self-effacing, two-room museum attests to its own authenticity and delivers a robust exhibition of key historical moments of the Scottsboro Boys' trials and the legacy these historical cases left behind. The entry area leading to the church altar exhibits contemporary student poster projects about the Scottsboro Boys on the left, and a small glass display of purchasable museum souvenirs and memorabilia is on the right. The church altar prominently features Governor Robert J. Bentley's 2013 posthumous pardon of the Scottsboro Boys, which recognized their innocence and much-delayed justice.

The heart of the museum's exhibition is in a room adjacent to the altar on the left. This room showcases trial records, original newspaper periodicals, testimonial displays and photographs, as well as artifacts inviting visitors to engage with the history through the perspectives of the lawyers, young defendants, judges, and those who falsely accused the youths of crimes. Different wall spaces commemorate and reflect upon the perspectives of each of the case's key participants. The wall on the left of the main exhibition area features a picture of defense attorney Samuel Lowenstein, honoring his efforts to revert the initial death sentences. Framed photographs of each defendant accompanied by their own words drawn from legal records or correspondence between lawyers and family members line...