The Chicago Defender article features a photograph picturing Vassar women who participated in a protest to appeal the death sentence given to seven Black teenagers in Scottsboro, Alabama. These boys were wrongly accused of assaulting two white women in 1931. This article is an example of Vassar students participating in civil rights activism even if their school was not accepting non-white women.
Full Article
White Girls Protest Scottsboro Injustice
The Chicago Defender (National edition) (1921-1967);
Apr 9, 1932;
ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Chicago Defender
pg. 22
IN THE NAME OF JUSTICE—Four white girls, students of two of America’s foremost finishing schools for women, joined the hundreds of other Americans and foreigners who love justice in an appeal to save the seven boys in Scottsboro, Ala., from death in the electric chair. The college girls carried the plea directly to congress following the recent decision of the Alabama supreme court upholding the death sentence of a lower court. With Senator Royal S. Copeland, New York, are the girls, who, reading from left to right, are: Misses Evelyn Rosenthal and Riva Stocker of Vassar college and Misses Florence Smith of Wellesley and Dorothy Lippincott of Vassar.
White Girls Protest Scottsboro Injustice original article (PDF, 70KB)
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.