Scottsboro
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
Alabama, 1931. A posse stops a freight train and arrests nine black youths. Their crime: fighting with white boys. Then two white girls emerge from another freight car, and within seconds the cry of rape goes up. One of the girls sticks to her story. The other changes her tune, again and again.
A young journalist, whose only connection to the incident is her overheated social conscience, fights to save the nine youths from the electric chair, redeem the girl who repents her lie, and make amends for her own past.
Stirring racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism into an explosive brew, Scottsboro is a novel of a shocking injustice that reverberated around the world.
'A fine novel . . . Anyone who wants to appreciate the scale of the miracle that a black man has been elected president of the United States should sit down with Scottsboro' Lionel Shriver
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in 1931's Jim Crow South, Feldman's dramatization of the infamous Scottsboro case makes for bleak, if familiar, reading. Alice Whittier, an ambitious, crusading journalist at the left-wing New York City publication The New Order, covers the arrest of nine young African-American men in Scottsboro, Ala., for the alleged rapes of two white prostitutes. Four days later, the Alabama courts have tried and sentenced eight to die. With a keen sense of drama, Feldman follows the story as worldwide indignation grows, and the case bogs down in appeals and retrials before an eventual hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court. Through it all, Alice, the only woman journalist on the story, reports the events in gruesome detail, conducts her trust-funded life and quiets some rattling family skeletons. She emerges as a satisfyingly fleshed-out character, as does syphilitic, guilt-ridden accuser Ruby Bates. But the best thing about the novel is the detailed, matter-of-fact way in which it recreates Alice and Ruby's milieus both of which are removed, in very different ways, from the world of the accused. What emerges is a raw sense of alienation and collision, with the novel's true protagonists mostly offscreen.
