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Scottsboro

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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.

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

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.

Upon its hardcover publication in 2008, "Scottsboro," by Ellen Feldman, was named one of the five best novels of the year by the "Richmond Times-Dispatch," and longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2009. Feldman, previously author of the novels Lucy; and The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank: A Novel; is a regular contributor to the "Huffington Post." It's for sure she's done a ton of research for this novel; she also must have a lot of self-confidence to dare to go back and reexamine the Scottsboro case, one of the most famous of the early 1930s, in fiction. And she's needed a powerful imagination to breathe life into the controversial old case.

An Alabama posse stopped a freight train on the afternoon of March 25, 1931, and rounded up nine black youths, ranging in age from thirteen to nineteen: they'd been fighting with white boys. Then, suddenly, two white girls, dressed in men's overalls, turned up elsewhere on the train. The girls showed no sign of abuse; nevertheless the cry of rape went up. The nine black youths were immediately, and for a long time thereafter, in imminent danger of getting themselves lynched: it was a Jim Crow South at the time. And they were put on trial for rape, then a capital offense: for many years, they also faced the legal death penalty. The boys were largely defended by the American Communist Party, its legal arm, and its supporters; the NAACP also had a (smaller) hand in their defense. The case dragged on for almost 50 years, resulting in more trials, convictions, reversals, retrials and Supreme Court decisions than any other in American legal history. The boys were eventually proven innocent of the charges, and freed. But their exoneration came too late for them: they'd spent the most significant years of their lives in some of the worst prisons the South had to offer at the time, in continuing fear for their lives, either through the legal machinery, or the extra-legal. None of them managed very well-adjusted lives: their employment and marital histories were spotty; all of them were to serve further jail time -- between them, they served more than 100 years in prison, and none of them lived particularly long. Only one ever received an explicit pardon.

To blow the dust off this case, set in a time and place of overwhelming racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism, Feldman researched first-person accounts, archival material, and court records. She has achieved a powerful, note-worthy book, and created two strong female characters that tell her story. First, Ruby Bates, one of the accusers, a little-educated, barely literate millworker - they were popularly known as lintheads at the time - and, as they weren't paid sufficient to live on, were generally part-time prostitutes too, as Ruby was. Also, Alice Whittier, a fictional composite based on actual players in the case: a well-heeled, well-educated young woman employed by one of the numerous left-leaning little magazines of the time. She staked her career on the case, was one of only two women allowed in the courtroom during the trials; and became a journalist of note, who hobnobbed with such as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his First Lady, Eleanor. Throughout the novel, Ruby seems better developed as a character; Alice serves more as simply a mouthpiece. (Unfortunately, later in the novel, as the 1930s wear on and the coming World War II begins to cast its shadow forward, Feldman seems to lose interest in both these women: they both appear to be simply sending sound bites from whatever front they're on.)

Nevertheless, "Scottsboro" is never less than compulsively readable, eloquent, intelligent, and passionate. As it happens, I'm one of those people known to New Yorkers as a red diaper baby; born the child of the many left-leaning idealists the Great Depression created. I think I had heard of the Scottsboro boys before I'd heard of Bing Crosby. It wouldn't be easy to get me interested and involved in a book on the subject, but Feldman's done it and then some.

Ellen Feldman seamlessly weaves historical perspective into a myriad tapestry of the mores of a small Southern town that not only provided insight into black and white lives, but also how poverty alters truth as easily as racism.

As nine black youths travelled in the Alabama Great Southern Railroad freight cars on an early spring day in 1931, a historical event of reprehensible proportions was about to alter their lives forever. What began as a simple misunderstanding quickly exacerbated into an avoidable altercation with white men aboard. The train approaches Scottsboro, and already word has reached men ready with rifles waiting for its arrival. In an attempt to save their dignity, two young white women on the same freight car, fabricate a vicious tale of violence, torture, and rape by those nine black youths.

Alice Whittier, one of the fictional narrators utilizes her faultless skills as a liberal, early feminist New York City newspaper reporter to convey the individual life histories of each of the accused, in an audacious attempt to encourage those outside this provincial circle of life to protest the indecency of fallacious crimes inflicted upon the genuinely innocent victims. As the news reaches the world, the Scottsboro incident becomes a rancorous hornet's nest of eminent lawyers, unpredictable judges, and an insidious competition between the liberal Communist organization and the conservative NAACP. Languishing in a repulsive jail, constantly assured that freedom is imminent, and lost in this muddled legal battle are the powerless defendants.

Meanwhile, the allegedly vanquished Southern young women, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates bask in the unwarranted limelight as the townspeople bestow new dresses and gifts as a way to soothe their own guilt. Conflicted and fearful of eternal damnation, Ruby Bates, the second fictional narrator recants in a pitiful attempt to aid the true victims.

Ellen Feldman's considerable research and flawless writing creates a vastly invaluable source of knowledge about nine black men who unwillingly and tragically sacrificed dignity and freedom because poverty, ignorance, fear, and injustice triumphed.

Undoubtedly, one of the most engrossing and unforgettable books I have read.

Scottsboro is really historical novel writing at its finest. I was completely absorbed in this skillful blend of fact and fiction, becoming engrossed in the story and learning a lot too.

What more could you ask for? That the author, Ellen Feldman, take on sexism, elitism, communism, racism, antisemitism, sexuality and more in one book? And pull it off? Well she does and she does.

The author notes in an afterword that when she told people she was writing about Scottsboro, this news was often greeted enthusiastically, only to be followed with a request to, "refresh my memory." Like those the author talked to, I too, distinctly remembered that the case of the Scottsboro Boys was a landmark one, that the Scottsboro Boys were accused of the rape of a white woman, and that the city's name is something of a rallying cry for racial equality in the justice system. But nothing more.

What I failed to recall, or was probably never taught, were all the amazing intricacies of the case, how the case affected the criminal justice system, and, sadly, what the ultimate outcome of the case was. Meanwhile, I had never considered the fascinating times that the trial of the Scottsboro Boys occurred in, and how this soup of modernity and old-fashioned values would make for such an interesting novel.

Scottsboro tells the story of those infamous boys as well as one of their accusers, Ruby Bates, mostly through the eyes of Alice Whittier, girl reporter. Alice is apparently an amalgamation of a few woman reporters of the time. While she starts off as a bit of a stereotypical Girl Friday or film noir wise-gal, she quickly fleshes out into a perceptive narrator who also provides a window into the sexism and political climate of the time. Alice sets off, like everyone else, to get her story on the 6 Scottsboro boys accused of raping two white women (prostitutes, the truth must be told) on a train where all were hitching a ride. Inspired by the idea to visit the accusers, she also travels to get the story from Victoria Price, a hardened woman who gives up few secrets, and Ruby Bates, a confused young girl with a desperate desire not to be looked down upon.

The case itself, however, provides the most riveting material. And while Ellen Feldman cannot be given credit for how history plays out, she can be given credit for writing it masterfully. I read greedily to discover what my memory couldn't provide -- how does the case turn out? What about the appeals? Will the anger and hate simmering under the surface boil over? Well, maybe you know, but if you don't, it's really exciting.

Meanwhile, the real jewel here is the story's other narrator, Ruby Bates, a confused tramp (in both senses of the word) whose voice rings out loud and clear. Her dialect is so deftly written -- never so overdone that it becomes distracting -- that I could truly hear Ruby. She's not a heroine, to be sure, but she is written as a very complex, very human character, and Ellen Feldman should be proud of what she has created in her.

This book was a real page-turner and I doubt I will ever forget the sad case of the Scottsboro Boys ever again. Bravo, Ellen Feldman, for bringing their story to life.

March 25, 1931. This infamous day in Alabama begins an American tragedy that will play out on a national stage for the next five decades. When nine black youths are removed from a freight train and arrested by an irate white mob, accused by two white girls of rape, the imagination of a nation is engaged in an epic battle that revisits ancient enmity between north and south, old prejudices ignited and further inflamed by a country in the desperate throes of the Great Depression, thousands wandering in search of odd jobs, any diversion from a life grown mean and humble. Poverty and race simmer uncomfortably in hobo camps that spring up around the railroad tracks, easy women plying their trade, no better off than the men they approach.

This is Jim Crow land. In an attempt to deflect interest in their presence on the train, the two young women claim they have been harmed by the boys; the affects reverberate across old wounds, giving vent to racial hatred and anti-Semitism, awakening the cause of white Southern womanhood, capturing the attention of a burgeoning Communist Party and dramatizing the subtle inequities of justice. Careers will be made and broken, New York lawyers finding national acclaim, local prosecutors playing to a snickering audience, all before inscrutable judges and the silent, intimidated defendants. From the perspective of an independent female reporter, Alice Whittier, the drama unfolds, trial after trial, hearings by the highest court of the land, public interest captured by the recanting of one of the women, Ruby Bates.

Victoria Price remains adamant, while Ruby suffers pangs of conscience, which Alice Whittier mines in search of truth. Contrasting the incarceration of the falsely-accused Scottsboro boys with the carnival-like atmosphere of packed courtrooms, Alice's voice is sometimes overridden by Ruby's complaints. As much a victim in her own way as those she has named, Ruby is a product of her culture and limited resources, fearing only the damnation of her soul. Hinging on the testimony of such women, nine lives remain in limbo, most dying in jail before the case is adjudicated, only one, Clarence Norris, pardoned by Governor George Wallace after the Voting Rights Act of 1976. In Feldman's decisive prose, the years march by, outrage a by-product of a deplorable injustice, a fierce legal tug-of-war between the passions of north and south.

Dissecting the case from every angle, Feldman ignores no aspect, the New York lawyers, the fledgling NAACP, a prison system that submits prisoners to the daily humiliations of a meager existence, a hungry press tacking back and forth between Alabama and New York in search of new stories, Hoover replaced by Roosevelt with an opportunity to turn the economy around, and a world war, the country finally freed from the grip of the Depression. Years pass, the Scottsboro "boys" grow old on death row or in local jails, their fate in the hands of an unreliable witness and a jury system that enables legal lynching. Even when this sad chapter in our nation's history comes to a quiet close, its victims reclaimed by death, troubling questions remain, a deep psychic scar that runs straight through America's heart. Luan Gaines/ 2008.

When, in 1931, nine young black men were pulled off a train in rural Alabama and accused of raping two young white women who happened to be on that same train, no one could have imagined the ultimate outcome. Earlier, the young men had drawn attention to themselves by tossing some white boys off the moving train and, subsequently, the train was halted by a group of vigilantes seeking revenge for that insult. The two white women aboard the train were just a bonus to the mob, an excuse for a quick lynching that the young black men would barely escape.

Ellen Feldman recounts this real life event largely through the eyes of Ruby Bates, one of the young women who falsely accused the young black men of raping her and her friend Victoria Price. Feldman alternates between the first person accounts of the real life Ruby and fictional reporter Alice Whittier in order to explain the events of the fifty years following the original arrest of the nine Scottsboro boys. Interestingly, and very effectively, the Scottsboro boys themselves remain largely in the background - as they did for most of the lawyers, reporters, judges, Communist Party members, NAACP members, and others who were happy enough to exploit the plight of the boys for their own gain.

It was, of course, impossible for any of the nine accused rapists to receive a fair trial in Jim Crow era Alabama. Even after Ruby Bates recanted her original testimony and a new trial was granted to one of the defendants, a new jury returned the same guilty verdict and death sentence. No matter how many juries or courtrooms heard the evidence against any of the nine, the result was invariably the same because, as Feldman makes clear in the novel, no white person could vote anything other than guilty if he wanted to live in the state of Alabama after the trial.

Feldman uses the relationship between reporter Alice Whittier and accuser Ruby Bates to get at the heart of how this kind of thing happens. Ruby, an impoverished part-time mill worker whose family barely sustained itself during the Great Depression, was desperate for cash money. She and the more aggressive Victoria Price were part-time prostitutes who enjoyed the men and attention as well as the extra cash they received from selling themselves. Ruby was a follower, directed by Victoria to give false testimony, but she was no fool. She gained fame by changing her testimony to favor the defense and, for a while, was able to turn that fame into a new life in New York City supported by those seeking freedom for the Scottsboro boys.

"Scottsboro" is a clear snapshot of an era of American history during which racial minorities had few rights in the South, a time when poor whites, economically no better off than their black neighbors, marked their own place in society by demonstrating to those neighbors that they were racially superior to them. By telling her story through the eyes of one of these desperately poor whites, Ellen Feldman makes what happened, in the context of its times, almost understandable.

What happened in Scottsboro makes for sad reading, a story without a happy ending, but sometimes it takes a novel like this to remind one that it all happened to real people, people with simple hopes and dreams, people who were victims of their times, accused and accuser, alike.

I read Scottsboro until the small hours of the morning, then woke early to finish it. The novel is a stunning achievement. It is so very real: I felt myself in Manhattan in the 1930's in newspaper offices and then in the jails and streets and courthouses of Alabama, and in Mrs. Roosevelt's private rooms in the White House. I felt the characters with visceral intensity as if they were brushing my sleeve.

The novel is told from the points of view of two utterly different women beginning in the Great Depression of 1931: Alice, the young upper class reporter living modestly on her trust fund who "has outrage to spare" for the nine black young men called the Scottsboro boys who are wrongfully accused of raping two white, semi-prostitute girls; and Ruby, one of the girls, terrified, living in the worse squalor, suspicious of everyone, almost willing to sell her soul for a pair of nice shoes. This former mill worker vacillates back and forth between lying in terror that she was raped; then rising as a semi-educated, flaunting heroine dressed gorgeously by supporters and speaking all over the country in defense of the boys, and then cravenly lying again in her old age, desperate for approval and money. It is the clash and sympathy and odd relationship between the woman reporter who has beautiful shoes and this beaten-down mill girl who holds the fate of the nine young men in her hands that is the remarkable center of this remarkable novel.

Outside of this, a large cast of judges, lawyers, reporters, the poor, social reformers, jailors and the condemned make a fascinating and complex story of miscarried justice which played out over thirty years of the last century.

A great book! Buy it and read it!

4901. Scottsboro A Novel by Ellen Feldman (read 3 Feb 2012) This 2008 novel is based on the Scottsboro case--the best account of which is Dan Carter's book, which I read 7 Dec 1969. The story is true to some extent but a major character in the novel is fictional and she has much interaction with Ruby Bates, one of the accusers, and so that part of the story is bound to be tainted by much fiction. The book is great to the extent it tells of the facts, but I am not sure it adds much to have the fictional story added to the facts.