Stories of Scottsboro - Softcover

Goodman, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679761594 ISBN 13: 9780679761594

Publisher: Vintage Books, 1995

Synopsis

In 1931, outside the town of Scottsboro, Alabama, nine black youths were charged with the rape of two white women. The case became a cause celebre that shocked America, reawakened the struggle for racial equality, and led finally to two landmark Supreme Court decisions. In this powerful retelling of the Scottsboro case, James Goodman, an assistant professor of history at Harvard, sets out to answer the question "what happened?" by moving from one point of view to another - the defendants, the two white women, the Communist Party who would shoulder the costs of the black youths' legal representation, Northerners, Southerners, blacks and whites - detailing not only what they saw and heard, but also how their memories, ideas, and past experiences shaped their perceptions of the case. Goodman shows how people were able to present their stories of Scottsboro as the true "Story of Scottsboro, " discounting other accounts in the process. Using trial transcripts, countless newspaper and magazine articles and editorials, reports of private investigators, diaries, memories, oral histories, and autobiographies, Stories of Scottsboro is an engrossing exploration of the way in which history takes shape in people's minds through the stories they choose to relate.

About this title

Review:

"This gripping book does much more than tell the story of Scottsboro with new information and insight. It invents a new way of writing history. Like a kaleidoscope, the author rotates the stories told by various participants in that cause of the 1930s, causing new patterns to emerge until they take a form we can call truth."--James M. McPherson

About the Author:

James Goodman is the Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of But Where Is the Lamb? Imagining the Story of Abraham and Isaac, Blackout, and Stories of Scottsboro. He has received fellowships and awards from NYU, Princeton, Rutgers, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is the US editor of the journal Rethinking History and is a professor at Rutgers University, where he teaches history and creative writing. He lives in New York.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Books
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0679761594
• ISBN 13: 9780679761594
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 496