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FREEDOMWAYS THIRD QUARTER 1969 ture of the conflicting forces in that infamous ordeal which rose in Alabama and involved reaction nationally. The physical structure called the Scottsboro Case stands forth in bold relief but the policy of the racist court hearing is hidden. The ideological genocide that characterized that infamous affair is hidden, what reaction wanted to do is hidden. There is no such interpretation of these facts as would come from a serious historian if he were seeking to bring his readers the meaning of so complex an historical event as this attempt to murder nine black youth. The social forces attempting this wholesale legal lynching are not presented. They are today still not fully recognized by the great majority of Americans, black or white. That is one of the tragedies of the book. A review of Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South must therefore be a polemical document. The reviewers must try to reveal to the public what the author has done and the state tried to do. That the author hailed from the south, that those who inspired him to write, who advised him and helped him gather material are southerners, that a leading historian, C. Vann Woodward, has glowingly reviewed his work, are not matters of much significance. That the south has no monopoly on racism is vastly significant. That the author has in 1969, when black Americans are carrying their centuries-old heroic battle for democracy to its highest political level, taken a glorious struggle of black men and their white allies and divested it of its far-flung political and ideological content and failed to analyze the social forces in conflict is a matter of profound political significance. The lessons of the Scottsboro of 1931 must be presented to those engaged in the Scottsboros of 1969. The omission is sinister. The very title is a misnomer. Scottsboro was neither a tragedy of Alabama or of the South alone. Racism in all its murderous and terroristic forms is not the property of any single state or section of our country. Racism is a policy of government, city, state and federal demanding police brutality to force its acceptance upon black victims, the mob violence of a white backlash to prevent the creation of a unified opposition, demanding widespread dissemination of the myths of white superiority to befog the minds of white educators and ideologists and to dehumanize the white masses. That is racism. Dan Carter, the historian-ideologist, cannot be a political analyst. His book conceals the relation of the Scottsboro case to the deep going economic crisis, the moral depression racism had created, and 266
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Reopened for Editing 2024-02-15 12:49:58
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Reopened for Editing 2024-02-15 15:08:23