Jeremiah Reeves (born 1935-died March 28, 1958) was a 22-year-old African American, former jazz drummer, executed by the state of Alabama by electrocution for two rapes he allegedly committed in 1952. Reeves was a grocery delivery boy who claimed his sex with a white woman was consensual. Reeves' actual guilt of the offense of rape is tenuous at best considering his defense was not allowed to argue the validity of the claim that the sex was consensual on appeal in Federal Court because of the state law (primarily in the south) that banned any mixed race relations between the sexes. The lack of Federal Courts' willingness to overturn precedent that allowed the ban of mixed races relationships in all cases after the passage of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 and Alabama's Anti-miscegenation laws which effectively outlawed sexual of relations between partners of a different races. Southern States would often prosecute African-American males who were known to have intercourse with white women without regard for intent or consent until Loving v. Virginia made this practice more difficult legally because of the fact that relations between races were subsequently perceived as legal in some cases (instead of illegal in all cases. With that said, Reeves' legal challenge of his conviction and death sentence by an Alabama State Criminal Court did make to Federal Circuit Court, however, the United States Supreme Court twice rejected his appeals.Concern over Reeve's treatment was one factor driving his younger schoolmate Claudette Colvin to defy Montgomery, Alabama's bus segregation rules 9 months before Rosa Parks Reeves' execution sparked a massive protest, among whose leaders was Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., as many saw him as a victim of racism and injustice. Reeves claimed that he was forced to sit in the Alabama electric chair Yellow Mama a night before he confessed. The State held Reeves on death row until he was old enough to be executed. He was put to death in the same chair used to extract his confession.
$1.9 Million
