Scottsboro, Alabama Scottsboro, Alabama Jackson County Courthouse Location in Jackson County and the state of Alabama Location in Jackson County and the state of Alabama Scottsboro is a town/city in Jackson County, Alabama, United States.
Named for its founder Robert Scott, the town/city is the governmental center of county of Jackson County.
It is positioned 30 miles each from the state boundaries of Georgia to the east (Dade County) and Tennessee to the north, about 45 miles from Huntsville, Alabama to the west and about 55 miles from Chattanooga, Tennessee to the northeast.
1.2 Scottsboro Boys Prior to Scottsboro's founding, the region surrounding the present-day town/city was inhabited by the Cherokee Indians.
While the Tennessee Valley did not have large Native American settlements at the time of the first white settlers, there was a Cherokee town titled "Crow Town" near where Scottsboro is positioned today. Delegates from Tennessee and the newly formed Madison County met in Sauta Cave and decided to admit a new county.
On December 13, 1819, Jackson County was formed. Then, only one day later, the State of Alabama was admitted into the Union as the 22nd state on December 14, 1819.
The first governmental center of county of Jackson County was at Sauta, a former native town, near present-day Scottsboro.
Scottsboro's founder, Robert Thomas Scott, served in the Alabama Legislature for almost 20 years and later ran a hotel in Bellefonte. Since he and his wife, Elizabeth, wanted a place to call their own and were not very fond of Bellefonte, they moved to Scottsboro around 1850 53.
In 1853, the newly formed Memphis and Charleston Railroad (a stretch of barns that starts at Memphis, TN, and ends in Charleston, SC) decided to build a station at Scottsboro and did so in 1857. In the same year, passengers started disembarking at Scott's Station.
On January 20, 1870, Scottsboro was incorporated by the Alabama Legislature.
Snodgrass was the first mayor. Scottsboro got its first telegraph office in 1872. The second requirement eliminated Stevenson and Larkinsville, and the County Commissioners ultimately chose Scottsboro as the county seat.
Courthouse assembly began in 1868 with the jail following two years later. County commissioners sited the courthouse at its current locale in the enhance square.
In 1912, the courthouse was completed and an election was held to determine whether the courthouse would be moved to Stevenson or stay in Scottsboro (some Stevenson inhabitants did not think Scottsboro deserved the part of county seat).
Scottsboro won the vote and the present courthouse was assembled (before the renovation and expansion in 1954.) Main article: Scottsboro Boys The Scottsboro Boys case was among the most meaningful cases in the history of American jurisprudence.
It went to the United States Supreme Court twice and established forever the principles that, in the United States, criminal defendants are entitled to effective assistance of counsel and that citizens may not be de facto excluded from juries due to their race. The case of the Scottsboro Boys arose in Scottsboro in 1931, when nine black youths, ranging in age from twelve to twenty, were accused of raping two white women, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, one of whom would later recant.
The victims and accused alike had all hitched rides on a passing train on the Southern Railroad freight route from Chattanooga to Memphis on March 25, 1931, which just happened to stop in Jackson County, Alabama where these women made their accusations to the small-town officials against these black youths. The defendants were brought to Scottsboro for trial because it was the seat of Jackson County. The four trials, amid the course of which most of the youths were convicted and sentenced to death by all-white juries despite the weak and contradictory testimonies of the witnesses, are now widely regarded (including in Scottsboro) as one of the worst travesties of justice perpetrated against blacks in the post-Reconstruction South.
Only the first trials were held in Scottsboro.
Of the initial nine young black defendants (some of them minors), accused of gang raping two fellow hobo white women on a freight train, eight were quickly convicted and sentenced to death in quick succession in trials occurring in a mob atmosphere in Scottsboro by all-white juries.
Fortunately, the Scottsboro defendants benefited from their two landmark triumphs in the United States Supreme Court, mostly from the fact that they were all relieved from the death sentences they had received at their first trial in Scottsboro.
The Scottsboro Boys had served long prison sentences when the arch segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace, in one of history's ironies, partially mitigated this widely accepted injustice (after the United States Supreme Court had floundered to do so twice) by issuing a pardon in 1976 for the one remaining Scottsboro defendant still subject to the Alabama penal system. "In January, 2004, amidst tv cameras and radio and journal reporters, a crowd gathered near the Jackson County Court House in Scottsboro to dedicate a historical marker commemorating the Scottsboro Boys' trial and their struggle for justice." "An 87-year-old black man who attended the ceremony, one of the several who could remember the cases firsthand, recalled that the mob scene following the Boys' arrest 'was frightening' and that death threats were leveled against the jailed suspects.
The Scottsboro Boys Museum was opened in February 2010. In 1900, Scottsboro was home to about 1,000 residents. Comer Bridge, a long steel bridge that now joins the governmental center of county to Sand Mountain, almost tripling the town's population.
The first electric lights in Scottsboro became working on January 21, 1916.
Scottsboro's first hospital was established in 1923. Louis. In 1932, Scottsboro officially became a "city" when an act of the Alabama Legislature bestowed that title on suburbs with more than 2,000 inhabitants.
Scottsboro's populace at the time was about 2,304. Since the early 1980s to the late 2000s, Scottsboro has seen substantial populace growth and an economy moved away from its non-urban agrarian past to a more diversified one.
Scottsboro is positioned at 34 39 5 N 86 2 33 W (34.651368, 86.042570). Enumeration Bureau, the town/city has a total region of 51.7 square miles (134 km2), of which, 47.3 square miles (123 km2) of it is territory and 4.4 square miles (11 km2) of it (8.47%) is water.
The section of the Tennessee River Valley that includes Scottsboro is geologically related to the Sequatchie Valley.
Scottsboro, Alabama In the city, the populace was spread out with 22.8% under the age of 18, 7.7% from 18 to 24, 27.8% from 25 to 44, 25.9% from 45 to 64, and 15.7% who were 65 years of age or older.
In the city, the populace was spread out with 21.7% under the age of 18, 7.9% from 18 to 24, 23.8% from 25 to 44, 27.7% from 45 to 64, and 18.9% who were 65 years of age or older.
Scottsboro is famously the home to the Unclaimed Baggage Center. This center sells articles of unclaimed and undeliverable airline luggage whose owners the air lines cannot locate.
The prices are low and the offerings eclectic enough to attract visitors from other states, and even from other parts of the world who make their way to Scottsboro to see what the rest have lost.
King Caldwell Park in Scottsboro The small, yet elegant, shop shows off a 1950s-themed design, offering the classic malt, and it even sports rare photographs of Scottsboro's past.
King Caldwell Park is situated near downtown Scottsboro, right next to the Library and athwart the street from the Police Department.
It is the home of Art Sunday, which is an arts and crafts festival that Scottsboro holds the Sunday before Labor Day each year.
The King Caldwell Park is titled after Scottsboro native and philanthropist, David King Caldwell, who went by the name "King Caldwell".
However, he never forgot his Scottsboro roots.
He constantly gave generously to small-town causes in Scottsboro and paid for the college studies of many Scottsboro school children.
He is still fondly remembered in Scottsboro for having gone to his namesake Caldwell School in Scottsboro and giving every child in the school a shiny new quarter, at a time when that was a lot of cash for a child to receive.
The Goose Pond region of Scottsboro has seen recent evolution of communities centered around a lake-living lifestyle.
Kennamer: History of Jackson County, Alabama.
Jackson County Historical Association, Scottsboro, Alabama 1935 (reprinted 1993), ISBN 0-9638815-0-7 Kennamer, John Robert, Sr., History of Jackson County Alabama, Jackson County Historical Association, Scottsboro, Alabama 1935 (reprinted 1993), page 3 Woodfin, Byron, Lay Down With Dogs: The Story of Hugh Otis Bynum and the Scottsboro First Monday Bombing, The University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 1997, p.
Jerry, The Story of Scottsboro, Alabama, Rich Printing, Nashville, Tennessee, 1968, p.
James Goodman, Stories of Scottsboro, Pantheon Books, New York, N.Y., 1994, pp.
David Aretha, The Trial of the Scottsboro Boys, Morgan Reynolds Publishing, Greensboro, North Carolina, 2008, p.
Civil rights prestige urges crowd at Scottsboro Boys Museum opening to rededicate themselves to cause | al.com "Annual Estimates of the Resident Population for Incorporated Places: April 1, 2010 to July 1, 2015".
"Annual Estimates of the Resident Population: April 1, 2010 to July 1, 2013".
"Popular Scottsboro Cyclist Killed WAFF-TV: News, Weather and Sports for Huntsville, AL".
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Scottsboro, Alabama.
City of Scottsboro Court House Square in Scottsboro History of Scottsboro Railway Terminal Municipalities and communities of Jackson County, Alabama, United States Cities in Alabama - County seats in Alabama - Micropolitan areas of Alabama - Cities in Jackson County, Alabama - Populated places on the Tennessee River - Populated places established in 1870
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