More than a decade after it opened in a former church, the Scottsboro Boys Museum and Cultural Center in Alabama will be renovated this month.
The museum remembers nine Black teenagers - four of them from Chattanooga - who were falsely accused of raping two white women while traveling through Jackson County, Alabama by train in 1931.
The defendants were held in Scottsboro during a series of three trials. Eight of the nine youths were wrongfully convicted - and sentenced to death by all-white, all-male juries.
Twice, the United States Supreme Court heard arguments in the case, leading to landmark civil rights rulings on the right to counsel and nondiscrimination in juror rolls.
Sheila Washington is the museum’s founder, director and tour guide.
