Movie Review

Scottsboro is one of those place names that come to stand for something bigger. The case of the nine black men falsely accused of rape in March of 1931 while riding a boxcar through depression-era Alabama is one of the most poignant in the long history of southern injustice. It resulted in four trials, none of them fair. Above all, Scottsboro was a tragedy of nine young men, ranging in age from 13 to 19, whose lives were destroyed by the lying allegations of two white women; the last of the "Scottsboro boys" did not gain his freedom for almost twenty years. But it was also a story of inspired interracial organizing by Communist activists determined to expose the racial bias of America's courts while building a mass movement for a better world and a story of the more cautious, defensive strategy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) with whom the Communists competed for African American support in this era. And it was one of the most dramatic legal battles in American history. This case that wrecked nine lives also yielded two U.S. Supreme Court decisions and saw one white southern trial judge order a retrial because a white jury's guilty verdict on weak and contradictory evidence was so clearly induced by bigotry. But it would not be until 1976 that the accused would finally win official pardons—from, of all people, Gov. George Wallace.

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