While finishing up the book I started to think about the similarities and connections it shared with the "The Stories of Scottsboro". The stories study a famous incident in history that brought about much attention throughout the U.S as well as overseas. In 1931, after a freight train brawl between several young blacks and several young white hoboes in Alabama, nine young African American men, age thirteen to nineteen, were arrested and charged with raping two young white women, who were seventeen and twenty-one. The young men might easily have been immediately lynched; instead, they were quickly tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. The case achieved international notoriety because of the racial nature of the charges and the patent unfairness of the trial, at least to many outside the South. No African Americans had ever served on a jury in the area, and the defense attorneys provided little support to the defendants. American communists took up the cause through their partyâs International Labor Defense groupâinitially the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was reluctant to get involvedâand thus the case became a focus not only of Americaâs racism but also of the supposedly pitiless nature of capitalism and its perversion to the justice system." The title "at the dark end of the street" is reference to the place where most of the rapes took place but it can also be a metaphor for white people wanting to keep these brutal situations in the dark shadows in hopes that we'll probably just forget about them. Black people on the other hand wanted to publicize these such abuses. It's a relation that whites in both cases just want to forget these abuses ever happened. Rosa Parks also was in connection with the Scottsboro stories. Rosa and her husband got involved in a movement to help free the black boys convicted in the trial. In return it helped her get more involved in the larger movement.
