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Case Lost, Insight Gained

\"The minute a Jewish lawyer from New York City came to Alabama,\" one historian noted, \"the case was lost.\"
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March 29, 2001

By 1933, Samuel Liebowitz, the assimilated son of Romanian Jewish immigrants, had won fame and fortune defending kidnappers, rapists, corrupt cops and jealous lovers. Fresh from defending Al Capone, he was enthusiastic when Communist Party leaders asked him to represent the most famous defendants in America: nine black youths falsely accused of raping two white women on a train near Scottsboro, Ala.

Not that star attorney Liebowitz cared a whit about civil rights. "Like many mainstream Americans, he was not sympathetic to the black cause," said Barak Goodman, writer-director of the 2001 Oscar-nominated documentary "Scottsboro: An American Tragedy," which airs Monday, April 2, on PBS. "And he hated Communists. He simply wanted to advance his career."

But despite his brilliant defense in Scottsboro at the youths’ second trial (the U.S. Supreme Court had overturned their first convictions), Liebowitz was simply perceived as a Jewish carpetbagger. "Let’s show [people] that the Alabama justice system can’t be bought and sold with Jew money from New York," the prosecutor urged the jury.

"The minute a Jewish lawyer from New York City came to Alabama," one historian noted, "the case was lost."

Liebowitz, who was deeply shaken by the bigotry, learned an important lesson about racism, anti-Semitism and the anti-Yankee feeling that still pervaded the South, and he began to empathize with his African-American clients. "He was able to understand their plight because he was going through some of the same discrimination and hatred," Goodman said. "For the first time in his life, he began to think of himself as a Jew."

Goodman and Daniel Anker, the film’s producer and co-director, were in part drawn to the Scottsboro story because of their own Jewish roots. Friends since childhood, they grew up in homes where Jewish identity was inextricably linked to social justice. Anker accompanied his mother as she registered Blacks to vote near their Maryland home. Barak, whose name means "lightning" in Hebrew, was disturbed by the racial divide in his Philadelphia suburb.

Goodman went on to write his Harvard University thesis on the black civil rights movement in Chicago. Some years later, he hooked up with Anker, a fellow Harvard alumnus and documentarian, to make the Emmy-nominated film "Daley: The Last Boss."

In 1994, Goodman again contacted his childhood friend after he read a nonfiction book about the trials and was mesmerized from the first page. "It was a great courtroom drama," Goodman said –and it had characters worthy of a Hollywood movie.

One of the nine black hoboes accused of rape was only 13 and had never been away from home before. Another defendant suffered from severe syphilis and could barely walk. A third was nearly blind and hoped to find a job to pay for glasses.

Their female accusers were textile workers who could afford to live only in the black section of town — where they occasionally traded sex with men of both races for food and clothing.

Victoria Price, 21, was tough-talking, tobacco-chewing and twice-married, and she had served time in a workhouse for adultery and vagrancy. Ruby Bates, 17, who was quiet and soft-spoken, disappeared after the first trial and re-emerged at the second as a surprise witness for the defense.

Like Liebowitz, she was forever transformed by the trials: "She not only became an advocate for the defendants, she became a lifelong member of the Communist Party," Goodman said. She ended up living in Harlem with a black lover. It was, Goodman noted, one of the stranger journeys in American history.

Litigation in the Scottsboro case dragged on for years, with some of the defendants remaining in prison until the late 1940s.

For the New York-based filmmakers, both 37, the trek South was also a strange journey. When Anker and Goodman arrived in the hilly environs of Scottsboro in the late 1990s, they were initially regarded with suspicion. The white citizens of the sleepy, quaint town perceived them as Yankees — "and a bit like ‘Jew-Commie filmmakers,’" Goodman said. "But it was very understated."

The documentarians, meanwhile, were well aware that time was of the essence. All the main characters of the Scottsboro drama had died, and two of the last remaining witnesses were gravely ill. So the filmmakers were relieved when several Scottsboro residents put their suspicions aside to appear on camera. One of their assumptions shocked Anker: "They still regarded the black defendants as guilty," he said. "For them, the case was merely the story of a rape."

Historians consider the Scottsboro affair an important victory for civil rights in America. The case spurred two key Supreme Court decisions: one mandating integrated juries, the other requiring that indigent clients in capital cases receive adequate legal defense. "During the trials, Whites and Blacks marched together for the first time ever," Goodman noted. "Scottsboro gave birth to an integrated civil rights movement."

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