Jeremiah Reeves

Jeremiah Reeves (August 8, 1935 – March 28, 1958) was an African American jazz drummer and a suspected serial rapist who was executed by the state of Alabama by electrocution after being convicted of raping a white woman, Mabel Ann Crowder, in 1952. At the time of the events, Reeves was 16, working as a grocery delivery boy. He maintained his innocence at his trial. Reeves was a classmate of Claudette Colvin, who later attributed her political inclinations to the Reeves case.

There was physical evidence that Crowder had actually been raped. Reeves was also suspected in the subsequent rapes and attempted rapes of five other white women, one of whom identified him as her attacker. Crowder also identified Reeves as her attacker after he was taken into custody. Although there were credible allegations that the police had coerced Reeves into confessing, the U.S. Supreme Court rendered this a moot point when it ordered a retrial for Reeves, saying that the jury should've been allowed to learn how it was obtained. After a retrial in which the confession was not introduced, Reeves had his conviction and death sentence reinstated. He was an adult by the time he was executed in 1958.

The Reeves case provoked anger among civil rights advocates. Martin Luther King Jr. noted that the controversy stemmed not from the question of guilt or innocence, but the severity of the sentence imposed on Reeves, especially given his youth:

A young man, Jeremiah Reeves, who was little more than a child when he was first arrested, died in the electric chair for the charge of rape. Whether or not he was guilty of this crime is a question that none of us can answer. But the issue before us now is not the innocence or guilt of Jeremiah Reeves. Even if he were guilty, it is the severity and inequality of the penalty that constitutes the injustice. Full grown white men committing comparable crimes against Negro girls are rare ever punished, and are never given the death penalty or even a life sentence.