The first portion of this chapter, historical in nature, deals with one of the most significant legal battles in the early twentieth century. The Scottsboro trials stood as examples of minority treatment in the criminal justice system. The second portion of the chapter deals with a highly significant child protection law, the PROTECT Act of 2003. PROTECT includes the AMBER Alert, used to rescue abducted children.

At the beginning of the 1930s most black Americans in the United States lived in extreme poverty, particularly in the South. Southern slavery had ended only a few generations earlier. Racism in the 1920s...