Viewing page 77 of 100

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

BOOK REVIEW          PATTERSON

that now has developed into a moral crisis.  He conceals the cultural backwardness that inevitably must be characteristic of a country steeped in racism and the terror accompanying that phenomenon.  It is clear that he does not understand the relationship but the omission is no less a negative factor.

Scottsboro case touched all mankind
The Scottsboro case belongs to history.  It was in fact one of the outstanding events in American history.  Blacks and politically con-scious white men, women and youth fought together desperately in that case to expose the roots of racism and to mobilize against it the millions, white and black alike, who are so disastrously affected by it.  The Scottsboro case was a fight for the lives of nine innocent youth but to achieve that end-that case had of historical necessity to be infinitely more than a legal matter.  That case was not the property of those slated to be its murder victims.  It was not the property of black America or progressive white America.  It was the property of all mankind to whom the hideous face and policies of American imperialism had to be exposed.
  Because of his political blindness, his inability to see the great conflict of issues, class, color and nationality, Carter offers his read-ers the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People on one side and the Communists and leadership of the Interna-tional Labor Defense on the other in a fierce clash, in a monu-mental conflict.  Those organizations had tactical differences but that was not the Scottsboro case.
  In Chapter III entitled "The Clash of Dogmas" Carter writes:
  "To the ILD and the NAACP the case had become a struggle for vindication.  To the Scottsboro boys it was a decision on which their lives hinged."
  But what had Scottsboro become to the masses.  They had little knowledge that it was one case in a long chain of legal lynch and extra-legal lynch cases to which they were linked.  The political char-acter of those cases had to be exposed if legal terror was to be brought to an end.  Carter does not deal with that question.  What kind of vindication did the ILD want?  It tried desperately to in-volve the people in that monumental struggle.  The NAACP wanted to depend on those courts which had in their files the legal lynching of thousands of black men.
  At the end of that chapter the learned historian is forced to admit that: "What they [NAACP] failed to understand was that there

267

Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-15 15:23:58