By Ellen Feldman

In March, 1931, as the Depression was deepening and 200,000 young people under the age of twenty-one were hoboing the country in search of an odd job, or a few scraps of food, or the little bit of fun that was supposed to be the birthright of youth, a group of young black and white men got into a fight on a freight train going from Chattanooga to Memphis, Tennessee, by way of northern Alabama.

After the black youths threw the whites off the train, the whites went to the nearest stationmaster to complain. When the train reached the next stop, a posse was waiting. They rounded up nine black youths, ranging in age from thirteen to nineteen, tied them together with a plow line, and loaded them into the back of a flatbed truck. Then the story really got good.

The posse found two girls in men’s overalls who had been on the train. Though the girls showed no signs of abuse, fast as anyone could say Jim Crow, the cry of “rape” went up. The nine black youths were taken to Scottsboro, the county seat, and locked up. In four days, and with grossly inadequate and probably drunk defense counsel, the state of Alabama tried, convicted, and sentenced eight of the nine defendants to the electric chair. (The ninth, who was thirteen, was deemed too young for capital punishment by some but not all of the jury.)

No crime in America, let alone a crime never committed, has resulted in as many trials, convictions, reversals, retrials, and Supreme Court decisions, including a seminal 1935 ruling. Collectively, the nine young men spent more than a hundred years in some of the worst jails and prisons in Depression-era America. Only one of them lived to be pardoned.

Toward the end of his exhaustively researched and deeply thoughtful book, Remembering Scottsboro: The Legacy of an Infamous Trial, James A. Miller 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 infamous 1931 case that dragged on for almost half a century. Surely these analogies are proof that Scottsboro remains relevant today.

But the idea of Scottsboro as a metaphor for every racially tinged incident is unsettling. The trial of a rich powerful African-American athlete bears little resemblance to the legal lynching of nine penniless powerless black youths. The young men convicted in the Central Park jogger case were railroaded by both the law and the press, but in that instance, unlike Scottsboro, a crime was actually committed. The Duke lacrosse incident, like Scottsboro, involved false charges of rape, an irresponsible press, and a district attorney more interested in publicity and self-promotion than in justice, but accusations against the white lacrosse players, while unfounded, unfair, and life-wrenching, were not signs of systemic and enduring prejudice against them for the color of their skin. Trying to shoehorn every racial injustice into the mold of Scottsboro is at once reductionist and misleading. If Scottsboro loses its particularity, we squander its significance. If Scottsboro becomes everything, then Scottsboro becomes nothing.

Fortunately, Miller is more interested in exploring how each era has viewed Scottsboro and turned it to its own ends. His analysis of the influence of Scottsboro on the social, political, and literary fabric of the past eighty years demonstrates not only the enduring power and relevance of the case, but its significance as a seminal event in the Civil Rights movement. Scottsboro convulsed the nation, reverberated around the world, and ushered in an era of mass demonstrations of both blacks and whites against institutionalized bigotry.

Miller begins by exploring the framing of the Scottsboro case. It is a nice play on words. Not only were the nine young men framed for rapes that never occurred, but both liberal and communist forces in the North and chauvinistic voices in the South vied to shape the story for their own purposes. While the NAACP debated how and even whether to get involved in the case, the International Labor Defense, which was the legal arm of the Communist Party, got out the message that racial discrimination was one more aspect of class war fare and the capitalist system.

Southern newspapers sounded a more backward looking cry. Grover Hall, editor of the Montgomery Advertiser and the recipient of the 1928 Pulitzer Prize for his exposes of the Ku Klux Klan, pronounced the Scottsboro boys guilty and their legal lynching fair. But the real criminals, according to the southern press, were the outside agitators. Southern intellectuals blamed not only those latter day political and legal carpetbaggers, but reconstruction itself. We have only to look at current red-and blue-coded political maps to recognize how the issues and perceptions of Scottsboro still divide the nation.

Miller goes on to explore both the effect on and the portrayal of Scottsboro in poems, plays, novels, and movies. With the exception of a handful of works of art, most of these have been deservedly forgotten. But two poems, “Scottsboro” and “Christ in Alabama”, by Langston Hughes, whose move to the left in 1931 was driven by Scottsboro, speak as forcefully to an era when hate crimes persist as they did when they were written.

Perhaps the writer who embraces not the Scottsboro story, but the Scottsboro ethos most fully is Richard Wright. As Wright wrote in How Bigger Was Born, “Never for a second was I in doubt about what kind of social reality or dramatic situation I’d put Bigger in…Life had made the plot over and over again, to the extent that I knew it by heart.” Wright saw rape as the “representative symbol of the Negro’s uncertain position in America.” Today, the underlying, if sometimes unspoken, fear of black sexuality, and the other side of the coin, the celebration of it in black exploitation entertainment, still linger beneath the surface of racial intolerance.

Another author who speaks powerfully to contemporary America was not a professional writer but one of the Scottsboro defendants. Haywood Patterson, whose autobiography Miller justifiably places in the tradition of slave narratives, was perceived as the leader of the Scottsboro boys. The youths, in fact, had no leader. Most of them did not know each other until they were rounded up, tied in a line, loaded onto the back of a truck, and driven to the Scottsboro jail. But Patterson was smart, fearless, and outspoken. He was, in Depression-era Alabama, the incarnation of uppity.

I found myself thinking about Haywood Patterson during the recent Cambridge contretemps over arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. As the press and the public fanned the flames of the incident, the general opinion seemed to be that both the cop and the scholar had overreacted. Is rage an inappropriate response to being arrested for entering your own home? Asking Gates to act deferentially under the circumstances is tantamount to the advice the nine Scottsboro youths undoubtedly got from their parents: If you see a white woman coming, cross the street. If you see a white man, get off the sidewalk. Just as in the 1930s, citizens should have had a right to both sides of the street and the sidewalk, so in 2009, they ought to have access to their own homes.

The question of Scottsboro’s relevancy to the twenty-first century goes hand in hand with the issue of whether Scottsboro is even part of our current consciousness. When I was on a speaking tour for my own book on Scottsboro, I was appalled at the public ignorance of the case. Many adults associated the word Scottsboro with a miscarriage of justice, but knew nothing of the details. Even more distressing, young people in both the South and the North had never heard of the case. Those who did know about it had often come to it by way of a peculiar and crooked path.

Harper Lee always denied that her Pulitzer-Prize winning bestseller, To Kill A Mockingbird, was based on the Scottsboro case, but, as Miller points out, that has not stopped the reading and movie-watching public from conflating Lee’s fictional rape trial with the actual incident. If fact, if you Google Scottsboro, To Kill A Mockingbird comes up pretty high on the list of links. The connection is especially pernicious since the book eerily echoes the original southern narrative of the case. The problem and the solution to it are both local, as Atticus Finch, the larger-than-life lawyer in the book repeatedly tells his daughter. Outside agitators are not wanted. Hope lies with the individual of good conscience, in this case Atticus Finch, even if he subverts the law, as he does at the end of the book.

The novel also harks back to the sexual politics of Scottsboro. Just as the ILD and northern liberals sought to portray the two women who cried rape as tarts, so the woman who accuses the black man in Harper Lee’s book is a sexual wanton. One might say, though Miller does not, that To Kill A Mockingbird, far from deepening our understanding of Scottsboro, perpetuates some of its worst myths. That is not to deny the book’s power, only to regret that it has, through no fault of the author, hijacked a heinous chapter in American history and transformed it into a reassuring fable.

Some welcome the makeover. They say a story of blatant and hopeless racism no longer speaks to an age when a black man sits in the White House. They say we live in a post-racial world. Today no congressman would go on record, as Tom Huddleston, a self-proclaimed liberal, did in 1931, saying that he did not care whether the Scottsboro boys were guilty or innocent. They were found riding in a railroad car with white women (though they were not) and deserved to go the electric chair with all deliberate speed. Nonetheless, elected officials currently question the citizenship of our first black president, and hate-mongering talk show hosts turn their own racism inside out to accuse him of prejudice against whites.

Thanks to a seminal Supreme Court decision in the Scottsboro case, African Americans now sit on juries, but unscrupulous prosecutors still manage to use their peremptory strikes to keep all minorities, who are deemed too sympathetic to defendants, out of the jury box. The list goes on and on. But how does Scottsboro relate to it?

A few years ago, when I was in Atlanta doing research, I met a young woman from an old and venerable southern family. I was flying to Germany the next day for a speaking tour in connection with a book I had just published about the aftermath of the Holocaust. The young woman was appalled. How could I set foot in the land that had nurtured Hitler and Nazism? Then the conversation turned to the subject I was working on at the time. She said, yes, she knew Scottsboro was a shameful chapter in our past, but why did I have to dig it up again? Couldn’t I let sleeping wrongs lie?

As long as sentiment like that endures, Scottsboro, in all its monstrous and unpalatable specifics, is more than relevant. It is crucial to our understanding of racism and our vigilance against it.

Ellen Feldman, whose most recent novel, Scottsboro, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, is a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow.