On 25 March 1931, a white teenager walking across the top of a freight car in northern Alabama stepped on the hand of a Black teenager named Haywood Patterson, who was hanging on to the side of the same train. A fight broke out. By the time it ended, a posse of armed men had stopped the train at a small station called Paint Rock, pulled nine young Black men off it, tied them together with plow line, and driven them to a jail in a town called Scottsboro. Two young white women

Huddie Ledbetter spent a combined fifteen or so years behind bars for a killing and a stabbing, and somewhere in between those two prison terms he became one of the most influential musicians America has ever produced. He wrote or preserved songs that would later define skiffle, shape the Beatles, and get covered by everyone from Nirvana to Led Zeppelin, and he did it while being marketed for years by the white folklorist who discovered him as, in his own words, a convict fir

Lee Harvey Oswald never stood trial for killing President Kennedy. Jack Ruby shot him dead in a Dallas police basement two days after the assassination, and the Warren Commission's conclusion that Oswald acted alone was delivered without ever being tested in front of a jury. In July 1986, a British TV production company decided to fix that, twenty-three years late, in a courtroom built on a London soundstage. On Trial: Lee Harvey Oswald flew a real Dallas jury, a real federal