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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"A fine southern legal lynching.", April 16, 2008
The case of the Scottsboro boys is well documented. On March 25, 1931, nine black youths were riding the Alabama Great Southern freight train when they got into an altercation with a group of white men. After the nine "Negroes" (some of whom were in their early teens) got off the train, they were summarily arrested for raping two white women. In her semi-fictionalized account of this incident and its aftermath, Ellen Feldman provides the shocking details of a shameful episode in our nation's history, putting the events into their political, cultural, and economic context. She demonstrates the noxious effects of anti-Semitism, misogyny, and racial prejudice in the Deep South, and incorporates the stories of some of the individuals who played key roles in what would ultimately become a cause célèbre. There are two first person narrators. One, Alice Whittier, is a product of Feldman's imagination. Whittier is a tough and ambitious journalist, as well as a feminist with leftist leanings. Her reporter's unerring instincts lead her to believe that her work on the Scottsboro story might boost her career. As Clarence Norris, one of the defendants, said, "For lots of folks, us boys was nothing more than rungs on a ladder." He made a good point, since lawyers, judges, "do-gooders," Communist party members, and other hangers-on shamelessly exploited the defendants and their accusers for their own ends. Meanwhile, for years to come, the nine men would suffer both emotional and physical torment. The other narrator is Ruby Bates, a pitifully poor seventeen-year-old mill worker who is functionally illiterate. Ruby's close friend, Victoria Price, persuades her to give false testimony. In the Jim Crow south, all-white male juries ignored the glaring inconsistencies in Ruby's and Veronica's statements. The first trial and subsequent retrials occurred against the backdrop of the Great Depression, a time of crushing poverty when sixteen million Americans were unemployed and two hundred thousand young people under twenty-one wandered from place to place like hoboes. For the downtrodden Ruby and Victoria, sudden fame transformed them into overnight celebrities. Strangers bought them new clothes and showered them with attention. For the first time in their lives, they felt important. Victoria was the more hardened of the two (she "had a mean streak a mile wide") and never did recant her statements. Ruby, on the other hand, came to regret her lies; she worried that because of her sins, her eternal soul would "go to torment" in the hereafter. "Scottsboro" is a beautifully realized portrait of an era when lower class white people were so browbeaten that they vented their frustrations on those who could not fight back. It is a tragic account of a terrible miscarriage of justice as well as an engrossing tale about a principled journalist who dares to expose the truth, no matter how unpopular it makes her. There are a few lighter moments when Alice takes time out from her hectic schedule to pursue her romantic interests. In addition, Feldman adds color to the narrative by vividly describing FDR's ascension to the presidency at a time when Hoovervilles dotted the landscape. The country gained two leaders when FDR took office; his wife, Eleanor, became a driving force for equality in her own right. Ellen Feldman consistently enlightens and entertains us. She also forces us to take a hard look at ourselves. If during a period of intense racial hatred, we had been on a jury judging the Scottsboro boys, would we have had the courage to acquit them? Or would we have yielded to the pressure from our local community and taken the path of least resistance? Feldman's evocative dialogue (written partly in southern dialect), absorbing plot, and touching depiction of the plight of the most vulnerable members of our society make this an impressive work of historical fiction.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Lies + White Women + Alabama = Tragedy & Injustice, July 15, 2008
I had heard of the Scottsboro Boys and the tragedy that surrounded them when they were accused of assaulting two white women in 1920s Alabama. I was excited when Scottsboro: A Novel by Ellen Feldman was chosen as my local book club selection for June. It became apparent however, that this story had a different slant, that of the lives of the two women who accused the men of rape; what drove them and what motivated their lives. Feldman took literary license by adding a fictional character, Alice, a journalist, while all other characters in the book were real life figures. Ruby Bates and Victoria Price were two women riding the trains dressed as men. When a brawl between young black and white men broke out, afraid of the possibility of going to jail, the two women committed an act of deceit and lies that would forever alter the lives of, not only the nine young black men, but their own, forever. Ruby and Victoria were what was known as "poor white trash." Poor, ignorant, uneducated and mired down by hard living, this was an opportunity for them to get some respect. They were revered as the pure and desirable white women that needed to be protected from the dangers of the feared black man. The nation was thrown into a tailspin by a crime that never occurred and the ILD, a Communist organization took up the cause, besting out the NAACP whose members' middle and upper middle class backgrounds caused class differences and therefore a distance from the poverty-stricken, country, unlearned Scottsboro defendants and their families. This case, that went before the Supreme Court, became a battle between the backwoods, uncultured, racist Southerners against the charismatic, Jewish attorney, Samuel Leibowitz and arrogant, pseudo liberal "Yankee" Northerners who defied and defiled Southern customs and traditions-- traditions that could hang a black man for the smallest infraction. Feldman, the author of at least two other fictionalized accounts of real events, Lucy and The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank depicted the "Scottsboro Women" as victims of societal ills, such as poverty and lack of opportunities, not unlike the Scottsboro Boys. Although Victoria held unto her lie of being wronged until her death, Ruby, under Alice's tutelage, recanted and reaffirmed her story over and over which brought about appeals to save the men's lives. Although this was a hard read for most of my book club members; we wanted to know why was it important for Feldman to write the story from the point of view of the accusers, we however, came away appreciative of the intricacies and complexities of this tragedy that has gone down in American history. This infamous case charted new legal statutes, one being, defendants are entitled to proper legal counsel. I recommend this book to those who enjoy reading fiction against a backdrop of historical events and figures. Dera R. Williams Marcus Book Club(Oakland) APOOO BookClub
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
truth and justice in the deep south, April 26, 2008
Thirty years ago I saw the TV production "Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys": this made a strong impression on me. So when 10 days ago I was browsing E. Bukowsky's reviews and saw this book I went out and grabbed a copy. What you get is a powerfully-told tale that will stick with you long after you've finished the book. It's a story of courage, cowardice, political expediency, prejudice, hypocrisy, and a truly evil perversion of justice. The time and place may seem remote now, but it's only true that a few things have changed: legal lynchings still exist, and too many people are happy to sacrifice others for political gain. The two storytellers are Alice Whittier (fictional), a reporter from New York, and Ruby Bates (real), one of the two women who claimed that they had been raped. Other characters include the twelve victims (those falsely accused of rape), prosecutors, judges of various stripes, Sam Lebowitz, and Communist Party members. Interests were decidedly mixed. At several points in the story, some of the people from New York ask each other "Would it be better for the Cause if the 12 are saved or executed?" The prosecutor wants to ride the case to the Governorship of Alabama. Judge Horton (at the first retrial) is a man of integrity. One of the doctors who examined the women tells Judge Horton that the women were not raped, but if he testifies his career as a doctor will be finished: he never testifies, and there's a fascinating question of whether we should judge him as courageous for telling the judge (which few at the time would have done) or cowardly for not testifying, even at the cost of his career. We are also left to ponder a situation where the Alabama Supreme Court rules, consistently with almost all of the white establishment in the state, that the word of a white woman--even a part-time prostitute--is sufficient evidence in and by itself to execute a dozen black men. One of the courageous people is Alice Whittier. Not only did the courts of Alabama not let women on juries, in cases like this they were not even permitted in the court itself: an exception had to be made in the case of a female reporter. Whittier is spat on, threatened with lynching, and even arrested and hauled off to another town for intimidation. But Whittier is fictional: this leads to the question of whether there were any women reporters actually present. There are moments in the book that seem surreal. After the first two trials (as I recall) the prosecutor approaches Leibowitz with an offer of a deal: he's willing to let about half of the accused go free if he can execute the rest. Ponder that for a bit. This seems to suggest that the prosecutor doesn't believe that the accused are actually guilty--but that to say so would mean that he didn't believe a white woman, and he would commit political suicide: he needs some executions. Also, if you feel that the book is about bygone times, and we've gone way beyond such things now, you'd be kidding yourself--we still have ambitious politicians who are willing to ride executions to higher office, and we still have executions where the only evidence is the word of a single person. Political courage seemed rare back then, and it often seems as rare now. So you get a powerful story here, compellingly told, and still relevant today.
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