Scottsboro
by Ellen Feldman
FICTION
PICADOR
06/06/08
After hopping a freight train in Alabama, 1931, nine young black men are falsely accused of rape by two white girls of dubious repute. The men are tried and re-tried for a crime they did not commit, but witnesses think nothing of lying under oath, and a jury made up of men born and raised to the idea of white supremacy in America’s deep South cannot contemplate any outcome besides guilty. The ‘Scottsboro Boys’ eventually evade the electric chair, but what life is left? Ellen Feldman’s novel focuses on the unreliability of the evidence given by Ruby Bates and Victoria Price. Although a closer look at the men standing falsely accused would add weight to their story, this is still a compelling fictionalised account of one of history’s greatest miscarriages of justice, a case that kick-started America’s civil rights movement.
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