Review Summaries

• Readers value the carefully researched account and the broad historical perspective, especially the way it reaches beyond the trials to the wider political and social consequences. Some also note that the legal history and racial violence make it a demanding read.

Reviews

• In early 1931, two young white women -- millworkers and, it was later alleged, occasional prostitutes -- hopped aboard a freight train headed from Chattanooga to Memphis. As the train passed through Alabama, a fight broke out between black and white males aboard the train. When the train was stopped, the two white women claimed that nine young black men traveling on the train had raped them. The men were given a quick trial where they were poorly defended, convicted, and sentenced to death. The verdicts caused an uproar that led to retrials and, eventually, to all of the black men being released. In the late 1960s, Dan T. Carter wrote an account of the case as his PhD dissertation in history at the University of North Carolina. The dissertation was published by the Louisiana State University Press in 1969. Although the book shows its origins as a dissertation in its copious footnotes, it is very well written. In fact, if this isn't the most readable doctoral dissertation ever written, I would love to read the one that is! Carter undertook a prodigious amount of scholarship -- particularly impressive for those pre-Internet days -- reading the trial transcripts, examining newspapers of the period, combing through the archives of the NAACP and other groups involved in the case, and interviewing the survivors he could locate. Although the tale is complicated, with multiple retrials, appeals to the Supreme Court, and continual strife among different groups trying to represent the defendants through the years, he makes the story surprisingly fast moving and interesting. Although we are -- mercifully -- far removed from the racial situation as it existed in Alabama in the 1930s, the book still has relevance for the insights it provides into that period. A few words about the revisions in this "Revised Edition." Like many revised editions of university press books published before digital typesetting, most of this edition is reproduced exactly as the book appeared on first publication in 1969; not even typos have been corrected. The book contains an additional chapter that was apparently added in 1979. In the 1970s, NBC broadcast a TV movie based on the book. At the time Carter believed that both women involved in the case had died in the early 1960s. In fact, both were alive and they came forward to sue NBC for defamation and invasion of privacy. The chapter describing the lawsuit seems longer than it needs to be and is far less interesting than the remainder of the book. In 2007, Carter wrote a new Introduction which provides an account of how he came to write the book. It is only in this introduction that he discusses -- quite briefly -- scholarship on the case over the 40 years since his book was first published. Ideally, Carter would have integrated that new scholarship into a revisions of the body of the text, but it seems unlikely that the publisher would have been willing to bear the expense. In any event, I think anyone interested in the history of the South during the twentieth century or anyone interested in accounts of historical court cases will find this book well worth reading.

• This was an extremely detailed account of the trials, witnesses, media coverage, and the tug of war between the NAACP and the Communist party to defend the Scottsboro Boys (9 Black teens falsely accused of rape in 1931). If you're looking for all the details, this is for you. If looking for a quick overview, this isn't it. This was recommended to me by the Scottsboro Boys Museum as the best of the several books on this topic - and I found it to be excellent.

• This book tells the story of a gross miscarriage of justice and tells the story rather well. Carter helps us to get back into the era to understand how justice was meted out to blacks and white in Scotsboro, Alabama.

• Delivered early and in good condition. Excellent!

• Am a civil rights history buff (and civil rights attorney). Had only a cursory knowledge of this event and litigation and got this book. It is very well done. Liked the follow-up (in the re-issued book I got) regarding the civil trial of the two accuser-women who sued when the TV show (based on the book) was made and broadcast.

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