James A. Miller - Remembering Scottsboro: The Legacy of an Infamous Trial

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2009 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Miller, James A., 1944

Remembering Scottsboro : the legacy of an infamous trial / James A. Miller.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-09080-1 (cl : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-691-14047-6 (pbk : alk. paper)

1. Scottsboro Trial, Scottsboro, Ala., 1931. 2. Trials (Rape)AlabamaScottsboro.

3. African American menFiction. 4. African AmericansCivil rightsHistory. I. Title.

KF224.S34M55 2009

345.761'9502523dc22 2008036301

press.princeton.edu

eISBN: 978-1-400-83322-1

R0

TO MY PARENTS

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

This book goes back a long way and has its origin in a larger project on African American cultural politics of the 1930s, initiated at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research in 1993; I thank the Institute, its Director Henry Louis Gates, Jr., its staff, and my colleagues at the Institute for their support. I continued my research as a Fellow of the Schomburg Centers Scholar-in-Residence Program, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/Aaron Diamond Foundation. I thank both the staff and my colleagues at the Schomburg for their support; a particular note of thanks goes to Diana Lachatanere. This work also owes significant debts to the joint research launched by my friends and colleagues Susan Pennybacker and Eve Rosenhaft, based in part on research Susan had conducted in the Russian State Archives of Social and Political History in Moscowresearch that led to our jointly authored article Mother Ada Wright and the International Campaign to Free the Scottsboro Boys, 19311934. That article, in turn, was an outgrowth of Images of Scottsboro: Racial Politics and Internationalism in the 1930s, a paper coauthored by Susan and me and that we presented at Racializing Class, Classifying Race: A Conference on Labour and Difference in Africa, USA and Britain, St. Antonys College, Oxford, in 1997. Susan, Eve, and I also presented some of our joint research on the international dimensions of the Scottsboro case at the University of Manchester, England, in 1998, and at the Third International Conference of the Collegium for African American Research (CAAR) in Mnster, Germany, and at the Anglo-American Conference, University of London, in 1999. I thank Susan for her generosity in sharing the resources of her private files.

I am grateful for the assistance from the staffs of the following libraries and collections: Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, Alabama; Beinecke Library, Yale University; Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University; Library of Congress; National Archives, College Park, MD; Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, Los Angeles; Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library; the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; Tamiment Library, New York University; and the Special Collections Research Library, Syracuse University Library. I also appreciate the assistance of Paul Gardullo of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution, and Wendy Wick Reaves and Lizanne Garrett of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. And I owe a special note of thanks to Elisa Marquez of AP Images.

I presented portions of this manuscript-in-progress at the 1998 annual meeting of the Japanese Association for American Studies, Chiba University, Japan; as the 1998 Tag Lecture at East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina; at the 2004 African American Identity Travels Conference, University of Maryland, College Park; and at Minsk State Linguistics University, Minsk, Belarus; Rutgers University-Camden; Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, Atlanta, Georgia; Wayne State College, Wayne, Nebraska; and Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. I am grateful to the audiences who heard and responded to this material.

And I am thankful for the support of my colleagues in the English and American Studies departments, and the Womens Studies Program, at the George Washington University: Chris Sten, Faye Moskowitz, Dan Moshenburg, Gayle Wald, Patrick Cook, Jennifer James, Patty Chu, Tony Lopez, John Vlach, Phyllis Palmer, Melani McAlister, and Jim Horton. I also deeply appreciate the support of the office of the Dean of Faculty of Columbian College of Arts and Sciences.

Numerous friends and colleagues across the country offered information and insight as I worked on this project and I thank all of them, especially the late Lillian Robinson, Howard Gillette, Paul Lauter, Gary Okihiro, Maurice Jackson, James C. Hall, Van Gosse, Eliza Reilly, Alan Wald, Barbara Foley, William Maxwell, James Smethurst, Rick Hornung, Nicholas Moschovakis, Joanne Van Tuyl, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Dianne McWhorter, Dan Carter, and Gene Solon. My old friend Bob Gore has been a constant source of support and insight. Maureen Kentoff deserves a special word of thanks for helping to maintain an atmosphere of sanity in my workspace.

For their wonderful meals and intellectual nourishment I thank my good friends in Books98: Kent Benjamin, Chuck Lawrence and Mari Matsuda, Shirley Parry, Ginger and Jerry Patterson, Domy Raymond, Mary Helen Washington, Yvette Washington Irving, and Sherry Weaver. In many respects they have functioned as my ideal readers.

Edjohnetta Fowler Miller, Ayisha K. Miller, and John W. Miller deserve special thanks for their encouragement and support throughout this project.

I am indebted to Thomas LeBien for launching this work. Brigitta van Rheinberg, now Editor-in-Chief of Princeton University Press, patiently shepherded it through its early stages; Clara Platter brought it to a successful conclusion. I thank Brigitta, Clara, and their excellent staff, particularly Ellen Foos, Donna Goetz, and Jodi Beder, for their attention and guidance at every stage of the editorial process.