June 27, 2007
Duke University and the Scottsboro Boys Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 08:30 AM EST The front page of AmericanHeritage.com contains a link to John Steele Gordon’s fine piece in The Wall Street Journal comparing the Duke University lacrosse team case to the Scottsboro Boys case. It’s an interesting comparison, and rather than try to repeat Mr. Gordon’s argument, I’ll simply recommend his original essay to readers. As Mr. Gordon argued in the Journal, the “two cases offer a remarkable insight into how very, very far this country has come in race relations, and alas, in some ways how little. For race is central to why both cases became notorious. In Scottsboro, Ala., of course, the accusers were white and the accused was black. In Durham, N.C., it was the other way around.” I have only one criticism of Mr. Gordon’s op-ed. After reviewing the history of the Scottsboro and Duke University cases, he writes, “Here is where the real difference between the Scottsboro boys and the Duke boys kicked in: not race but money. The Scottsboro boys were destitute and spent years in jail, while the Duke boys were all from families who could afford first-class legal talent. Their lawyers quickly began blowing hole after hole in the case and releasing the facts to the media until it was obvious that a miscarriage of justice had occurred. The three Duke boys were guilty only of being white and affluent.” On one level, this paragraph undercuts Mr. Gordon’s larger argument. If he means to argue that race drove both cases, then it only complicates matters to suggest that the operative difference between them was the financial resources of the respective defendants. That said, life is complicated, and race and class are often hopelessly intertwined in America. But on a more fundamental level, it’s worth remembering that the Scottsboro Boys had a very well-financed legal team, courtesy of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the Communist Party’s International Labor Defense committee, both of which financed and coordinated the defendants’ various jury trials and appeals, and the American Civil Liberties Union, which conducted the initial outside review of the case. Because of the support they enjoyed from wealthy civil rights and left-wing activists, most of whom were based in Northern cities, the Scottsboro defendants enjoyed access to some of the nation’s finest attorneys; indeed, their legal defense team ultimately compelled the United States Supreme Court to issue landmark rulings on the constitutionality of all-white juries. In this sense, the key difference between the Scottsboro case and the Duke University case was not money. In both cases, the accused enjoyed full access to some of the best lawyers money could buy. In the Jim Crow South, not even the best attorneys could overcome the hardened racial sensibilities of an all-white jury; today, the best attorneys can see to it that facts overcome sentiment. Mr. Gordon is right to draw the comparison, and I agree with much of what he wrote in his piece. But I would draw a somewhat different conclusion. We are capable today of overcoming racial divisions in a way that was not possible in 1931. But money and resources still determine where the weight of justice falls, and when money correlates with race, as it so often does, it is not wealthy white college students who suffer the full weight of the law.
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