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Ralph Cooper, 24, Collis English, 23, McKinlay Forrest, 35, John McKenzie, 24, James Thorpe, 34, and Horace Wilson, 37, all blacks, were convicted by an all white jury of the murder of William Horner, an elderly white shopkeeper.  All were sentenced to death.  Horner died after being hit on the head with a soda bottle.  Horner's wife, could not agree on how many men were actually involved with the attack, only that it was two to four light-skinned blacks in their teens.

Five of the six arrested signed inconsistent confessions, which were obtained by police coercion.  All six had solid alibis and repudiated the confessions.  The police refused to say whose fingerprints they found on the bottle.  Some of the defendants were represented by NAACP attorneys, one of who was Thurgood Marshall, who later became a U.S. Supreme Court justice.  During appeals of the convictions, trumped-up evidence was revealed and the Trenton medical examiner was found guilty of perjury.  During a third trial in 1951, after an intervening mistrial, all defendants except English and Cooper were acquitted.  The convictions of the latter two were overturned in 1952, and they were never retried.  The Communist Daily Worker called the Trenton Six proceedings, “a northern Scottsboro case.”  (ISI)

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