By The Boy They Tried to Break
The Boy They Tried to Break
In the summer of 1951, sixteen-year-old Jeremiah, a Black high school student, was found in the home of Mabel Ann Crowder, a white woman. When they were discovered together, Mabel immediately claimed that Jeremiah had assaulted her. He was arrested on the spot and taken to Kilby Prison, where officers demanded a confession.
Terrified and alone, Jeremiah was placed in the electric chair as a threat. Police told him that unless he admitted not only to assaulting Mabel but to several other reports involving white women that year, they would pull the switch. Overwhelmed with fear, he eventually repeated what they wanted to hear.
Later, once the pressure lifted, he insisted those words were lies forced out of him.
Despite this, Jeremiah was brought to trial. The proceedings lasted just two days. An all-white jury deliberated for barely half an hour before sentencing the teenager to die. Many Black residents in Montgomery already knew that Jeremiah and Mabel had been secretly involved in a consensual relationship, and they recognized the trial as a grave injustice.
The local NAACP chapter stepped in and managed to draw the case to national attention. Thurgood Marshall, a rising legal figure, joined the fight. Their efforts paid off in December 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Jeremiah’s conviction. The justices ruled that the trial judge had been wrong to hide from the jury the fact that the confession was extracted through torture.
But the victory was short-lived. At Jeremiah’s second trial in 1955, the same pattern repeated: he was found guilty again and once more sentenced to death. This time, every appeal failed.
Jeremiah stayed on death row for years, waiting not for mercy but until he reached what the state considered the minimum age for execution, a moment that finally arrived in 1958.
