How were blacks excluded from juries in the US southern states in the 1930s?

Question

As I am in the process of re-reading Harper Lee's *To Kill a Mocking Bird*, I did a bit of elementary research on the subject of jury selection in Alabama. I discovered that in the *Scottsboro boys* case (1932 to 1936) the Supreme Court eventually ruled that the absence of African Americans from the jury pool denied the defendants due process. What interests me is in what techniques were employed to exclude people of African descent.

Answer 1

So far as I understand it, local government is responsible for sending out notifications indicating to those who receive them (in the mail) that they are required to report for jury duty. It is from this pool of potential jurors that a jury is picked for any given trial.

The people who worked in a local government - mainly patronage jobs that politicians used to reward those who supported them in the last election - would have been uniformly white. They would certainly have shared the segregationist values of the community and its leaders. The records of who resided in the locality, such as a County, would indicate who was white and who was black. As such, it would have been a simple matter of sending out jury duty notices exclusively to white residents.

Granted, I'm not an expert on the Jim Crow South, so I can't say for certain. But this seems the most likely way in which African Americans could be excluded from jury pools.