Trenton Six
Group of six African American defendants
The Trenton Six was the group name of six African-American men arrested for murdering an elderly white shopkeeper in January 1948 in Trenton, New Jersey. In August of that year, an all-white jury convicted the six men of murder and sentenced them to death.
The case became a civil rights cause célèbre due to alleged injustices committed after the men's arrests as well as questions about the fairness of their trial. The NAACP and Civil Rights Congress dispatched legal teams to appeal the convictions to the New Jersey Supreme Court. The court found fault with the trial judge's jury instructions and remanded the case for retrial. The second trial in early 1951 ended in a mistrial. In the third trial, which concluded in June 1951, four of the defendants were acquitted. The other two, Collis English and Ralph Cooper, were again convicted of murder, but this time the jury recommended mercy – life in prison rather than execution.
Civil rights groups once more appealed to the state Supreme Court, which again found fault with the proceedings and ordered a retrial. Before that could occur, English died in prison in December 1952.
The public source identifies “Trenton Six” as group of six African American defendants. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Trenton, Group and African.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7838600. The Library of Congress control number is sh2009006555. Authority coordinates are 40.223, -74.765. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1948, 1951 and 1952.
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This entry incorporates text from “Trenton Six” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.