Alabama 1931 and nine black youths fight with white ‘trash’ boys all riding illegally on a freight train. Two white girls cry rape. The ensuing court case found the black boys guilty although one of the girls later retracted her statement. That is fact. This very fine novel recreates the episode through the eyes of the girl who changed her story and an ambitious female reporter incensed by the miscarriage of justice. It is an extraordinary book of race, class, prejudice, anti-Semitism and injustice, powerfully told and really capturing the north/south division of the time, but most importantly the racial hatred, very much in the vein of a fictional In Cold Blood.
Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, a novel inspired by the shocking true story of the Scottsboro boys.
Even after all these years, the injustice still stuns. Innocent boys sentenced to die, not for a crime they did not commit, but for a crime that never occurred. Lives splintered as casually as wood being hacked for kindling.
Alabama, 1931. A freight train is stopped in Scottsboro, nine black youths are brutally arrested and, within minutes, the cry of rape goes up from two white girls. In the shocking aftermath, one sticks to her story whilst the other keeps changing her mind, and an impassioned young journalist must try to save nine boys from the electric chair, one girl from a lie and herself from the clutches of the past . . .
Stirring racism, sexism and the politics of a divided America into an explosive brew, Scottsboro gives voice to the victims - black and white - of this infamous case. Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2009, Ellen Feldman's classic charts a fight for justice during the burgeoning civil-rights movement.
