Permit me to quibble. Sam Liebowitz (Scottsboro defense counsel) believed that if he proved the stories of Victoria Price and Ruby Bates to be lies, there would not be “a red-blooded, upstanding citizen below the Mason-Dixon line who will not pray with their heart and soul” for the acquittal of his clients. But he was wrong about human nature. And that same nature, albeit dressed in other colors, was alive in Durham 70 years later; if nothing else, the two cases demonstrated that human beings are all the same under the skin.

The Duke case instantly became an example of “Us vs. Them”–black vs. white, rich vs. poor, feminist vs. male, townie vs. campus. It was about agendas and preconceptions (prejudices). That the negative stereotypes of the Duke players (rich/white/male/preppie/athletes) belied the truth; that the father of one of them had been raised by a black family, and the father of another had built a hospital in Africa, meant nothing. Truth was not strong enough to overcome the need for “our side” to win.

And Nifong’s prosecution could not have continued without the full support of the Durham community, whose prejudices he skillfully played upon : “I won’t let Durham become known as a place where black girls can be raped by white men.” Yet as Dan Carter said in his “Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South”, it was not possible to lay all the blame for that case at the feet of the chief prosecutor, “for his cynical tactics were made possible by the silent acquiescence of dozens of other business, religious, and political leaders. Nor was he the only individual–North or South–who exploited the case for personal and ideological reasons, however lofty.” The same was true of Durham.

We may have come far in erasing the prejudices of the past; but did we really think we could eradicate hate from the human heart?

R.B.Parrish (author, “The Duke Lacrosse Case: A Documentary History and Analysis of the Modern Scottsboro”)