Remembering Scottsboro: the Legacy of an Infamous Trial – Book Review

No crime in American history, produced as many trials, convictions, reversals, and retrials as did the case of the Scottsboro boys.

In Remembering Scottsboro: The Legacy of an Infamous Trial, James A. Miller explores how the famous case of 1931, in which nine young black men were accused of raping two white women on a freight train, continues to resonate throughout American culture after nearly 80 years. In this novel, Miller focuses primarily upon the ways in which the "Scottsboro Narrative" has been told and retold over the years.Remembering Scottsboro covers a range of illustrations from journals to literary pieces to dramatic re-enactments and even films. The first chapter, titled "Framing the Scottsboro Boys," looks at the Communist Party (CP) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) fight for control of the legal rights to free the defendants.

Miller demonstrates that the CP and its legal affiliate, the International Labor Defense (ILD) mounted a brilliant defense that constantly forced the state of Alabama to back down from its attempts to execute the defendants.This brought the political economy of Jim Crow to widespread attention. Several subsequent chapters address the representation of Scottsboro by a range of 1930s creative artists. Miller examines closely Langston Hughes's avant-garde "mass chant," Scottsboro Limited, with its prominent featuring of the "New Red Negro".

People like: Muriel Rukeyser, Herman J. D. Carter, Kay Boyle, Nancy Cunard, Mary Heaton Vorse, John Hammond and Louise Patterson, hoped to start social justice movements by bringing to light the atrocities that the Scottsboro boys endured.They did this through poetry and essay writing that were based on visits to Alabama and the rest of Southern US. John Wexley's They Shall Not Die and Paul Peters Stevedore brought the case to the stage by working from the base of the Scottsboro case. The Scottsboro Narrative supplied some of the text in William Wellman's 1933 film Wild Boys of the Road and of Fritz Lang's Fury in 1936.

These films were said to display the heart of the Scottsboro case.Grace Lumpkin's A Sign for Cain, a novel looking at communist organizing in the Jim Crow South, as well as Guy Endore's Babouk and Arna Bontemps's Black Thunder, novels depicting historical slave revolts, drew from their readers' knowledge with the Scottsboro case. Indeed, Miller argues, Bontemps's contrast between the main characters cannot be understood apart from their reference to the different personalities and values of various Scottsboro defendants. Battlecreek by William Dempsy, is an important novel, that looks at the case but instead revolves around white suspects.The rest of Remembering Scottsboro carries the “Narrative” beyond the 1930s.

Perhaps the most interesting chapter, "The Scottsboro Defendant as Proto-Revolutionary: Haywood Patterson," examines both the life and the autobiography (Scottsboro Boy, 1950) of the most notorious of the defendants. He is said to be a real-life counterpart both to Hughes's somewhat mythical "New Red Negro" as well as to Wright's Bigger Thomas. A chapter on Harper Lee's famous To Kill a Mockingbird analyzes the novel's ideological contradictions and acknowledges the continuing impact of the Scottsboro case .The "meanings and associations (of the Scottsboro case) may have changed over time," concludes Miller, "but the core of its references remains intact" (241).

James A. Miller's cultural study of the Scottsboro case is an important addition to literature about the meaning of some of the most controversial trials in twentieth-century American history. His worthwhile study emphasizes how the Scottsboro case “has continued to function as a multivalenced reference in contemporary American life” (3).Miller writes that his purpose of writing this book was “to explore the ways in which the shifting lexicon surrounding the Scottsboro case sheds light upon shifting and enduring American attitudes towards race and justice. ” (6) Taking the 1930s “Scottsboro Narrative” as its point of departure, Remembering Scottsboro tracks its construction, its disaggregation, its reconstitution, and its sublimation in journalism, poetry, fiction, drama, and film as it traveled through more than a half century of American life.Miller uses the ILD-NAACP conflict as a springboard to explore how the Scottsboro case affected Depression-era writers, poets, playwrights, screenwriters, and novelists.

His analysis of the influence of Scottsboro on the social, political, and literary fabric of the past eighty years demonstrates not only the enduring strength and relevance of the case, but its significance as a seminal event in the Civil Rights movement. Miller sees the Scottsboro case as the most celebrated racial spectacle of twentieth century American history, at least before the murder of Emmett Till in 1955.Remembering Scottsboro is presented as a battle for memory and meaning and it looks at how this case is embedded in the country’s history. Miller offers a cultural and literary perspective of these historical events. He points out that in recent years, the Central Park jogger case, the O.

J. Simpson murder trial, and the Duke Lacrosse rape accusations have all been compared to the case. The Scottsboro Narrative lives on in many contemporary literary pieces too.Harper Lee's 1960 novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, is seen by Miller as the 'Final Stage' of the Narrative. Miller contends that the trial of the Scottsboro Boys was re-imagined in Harper Lee's book, where the story was simplified to the alleged rape of a poor young white woman by a black servant. These analogies can be used as proof that Scottsboro remains relevant today.

James A. Miler previously stated that “the Scottsboro case sheds light upon shifting and enduring American attitudes towards race and justice. ” (6) In almost every aspect of this he succeeds.Miller’s book uses an exceptional range of primary source materials, from court transcripts and letters to poetic, filmic and novelist renderings of the Scottsboro case.

In order to burn away the myths of Scottsboro and to preserve the event as a template of American racism, radical politics and cultural production. One of the most significant parts in Remembering Scottsboro is Miller’s recitation of primary, internal documents of both the Communist Party and NAACP disclosing their competing strategies for controlling the Scottsboro case and publicity.For example, Miller cites correspondence between Tom Johnson, the CP district organizer in Chattanooga, and the CP Central Committee in New York debating tactics for the defense. Johnson objected to the Central Committee’s demand for a “New Trial” before a mixed race jury.

Miller has essentially created his own Scottsboro narrative, one where the evidence of literature, film, and drama are as important as court transcripts and newspaper articles. His chapters on theatrical and novelistic representations of Scottsboro are original in their excavation of sources.The ever-expanding archive of Scottsboro he presents suggests that while the last of the Scottsboro Boys is gone, the case they opened up against American racism and economic injustice remains wide open. Despite the fascinating descriptions of the literature that the Scottsboro case has inspired, Remembering Scottsboro serves more as a guide to works that reference the case, than as a deep analysis of the legacy of the Scottsboro trials' historical memory.

Miller does take many quotes from etters, articles, and literary works, resulting in chapters that sometimes contain too many long quotations and not enough of the author's own voice. The analysis of individual literary works, does not really come together to support a main argument or thesis. Miller could have drawn on some of the theoretical insights that scholars before him observed. Some of whom have done powerful work exploring the creation of frames for understanding the past. The strengths of Remembering Scottsboro are many.

Miller makes the Scottsboro case accessible once again to a wide public. He documents not just the effectiveness of the ILD defense but also its widespread influence on popular opinion, which largely rejected the NAACP's reformism. The cultural impact of this influence was the creation of literary and cinematic audiences that were assumed to be familiar with the events of the leftist view of the Scottsboro Narrative. For a change, a Marxist analysis of the relationship among race, class and gender appears to have enjoyed significant attention.Miller's contrast between the representation of Scottsboro from the early 1930s through the late 1940s and its subsequent representation during the Cold War and beyond demonstrates historical materialism and how it penetrated to the core of the American political unconscious.

On the other side, Remembering Scottsboro presumes that the audience has considerable knowledge of this topic. The book, somewhat surprisingly, does not open with a full recounting of the events of the Scottsboro case, so the reader only finds out some details as they come up in reference to various literary representations.There is never a complete description of what happened, or of the different versions of what happened. Also a knowledgeable audience might still be confused by the unexplained literary allusions that occur throughout the book. Miller's decision to focus upon U.

S. representations of the case lacks attention to its international dimensions, which could usefully have been brought into this study. These are, however, minor problems and Remembering Scottsboro is still a valuable contribution to the growing body of historical literature.