IT began with a fight between white and black hobos aboard a freight train bound for Memphis in the winter of 1931. Word of the brawl reached the sheriff in Jackson County, Ala., who deputized a posse to round up "every Negro" on the train. Dozens of heavily armed white men stopped the slow-moving freight at an isolated depot; a search of the boxcars and gondolas turned up nine black youths, ranging in age from 13 to 19. They were arrested for assault, chained together with a plow line and driven on the back of a rickety flatbed truck to the county jail at Scottsboro, a farming town of 3,500 in the lower Tennessee Valley.

http://www.nytimes.com/1994/04/03/books/only-the-accused-were-innocent.html...

Later that afternoon, a far more serious charge emerged. Two white women found running alongside the railroad tracks had accused all nine suspects of raping them on the train. As news of their story spread across the county, a huge crowd, chanting "Give 'em to us" and "Let those niggers out," threatened to storm the Scottsboro jail. A desperate phone call alerted the Governor of Alabama, who wisely sent in the National Guard.

Ms. Lee, like her alter ego Scout, was a tough little tomboy who enjoyed beating up the local boys, climbing trees and rolling in the dirt. “A dress on the young Nelle would have been as out of place as a silk hat on a hog,” recalled Marie Rudisill, Capote’s aunt, in her book “Truman Capote: The Story of His Bizarre and Exotic Boyhood by an Aunt Who Helped Raise Him.”

Ms. Lee attended Huntingdon College, a local Methodist school for women, where she contributed occasional articles to the campus newspaper and two fictional vignettes to the college’s literary magazine. Both gave an inkling of themes that would find their way into her novel. “Nightmare” described a lynching, and “A Wink at Justice” told the story of a shrewd judge who makes a Solomonic decision in the case of eight black men arrested for gambling.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/20/arts/harper-lee-dies.html?_r=0

Emmett Louis Till was born on July 25, 1941, on Chicago’s South Side and was nicknamed Bobo because of his fun-loving, cheerful disposition while growing up in the segregated middle-class neighborhood. When he was 14 he went to Mississippi to spend the summer with his cousins, and his mother gave him his father’s signet ring as a gift.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/obituaries/archives

On Aug. 24, 1955, after an exhausting day of picking cotton in the scorching Delta sun, Till and his cousins went to a local store run by a poor white couple in their 20s, Roy and Carolyn Bryant. Ms. Bryant was working alone in the store when Till went in to buy bubblegum. It is not clear what happened inside, but soon afterward Ms. Bryant stormed out, presumably to get a pistol from her car parked outside. Till, unaware of the danger, whistled, and his cousins, now panicked, quickly drove him away.

Ms. Bryant later claimed that Till had flirted with her on a dare. The details would later change depending on when she told the story.

Four days later, around 2:30 a.m., Ms. Bryant’s husband, Roy, and his half brother J. W. Milam pounded on the door of the Wright family home where Till was staying with a pistol. Bryant announced that they were “looking for the boy that did the talking.” Forcing their way in, according to a PBS documentary about Till, they roused Till from sleep, marched him to their car and sped away.