Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 36, Number 4. 21st March 1973

The Guts of Being in Gaol

The Guts of Being in Gaol

In his preface, Carter states that hopefully his book "also tells something of what it meant to the nine Negro youths whose lives were changed forever by one morning's ride on an Alabama freight train". For me he does not succeed. Carter is highly critical of the book, "Scottsboro Boy" written by Hayward Patterson in collaboration with Earl Conrad, when Patterson was on the run after 1950. But it is "Scottsboro Boy" which gets at the guts of what it was like to be incarcerated in a gaol in Alabama for 19 years. Carter does not understand the social forces that make people what they are, and therefore by just recording their acts, he fails to see the Scottsboro boys as the victims of society.

He calls his book 'a tragedy of the American South'. That is one-sided. The Scottsboro case, like that of Sacco and Vanzetti, played a significant part in raising the consciousness of American working people, black and white, for their emancipation.

Nonetheless, "Scottsboro" is an important book to read.