Despite Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s diktat to cancel it for members of the United States Armed Forces, February remains Black History Month, and today begins its observance on Mark’s Text Terminal with this reading on the Scottsboro Boys along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
As a middle school student, I would often take extended bathroom breaks so that I could visit the library to look at Time Magazine’s year-by-year Time Capsule books, which fascinated me. It was in one of these volumes that I first became aware of the case of the Scottsboro Boys. Even in the bland prose of Time Magazine, and even to my then relatively unschooled mind, this was obviously one of the most grotesque miscarriages of justice ever perpetrated in a country that is at this point known for such things–especially where and when Black people are concerned.
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