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

Campaign for Release

Campaign for Release

In 1933, Ruby Bates, who had been a star witness for the prosecution, denied that she had ever been raped and became a campaigner for their release. The Communist Party of the United States which led the struggle for the defence in the early years, made Scottsboro a name known in every country in the world.

Dan Carter has now produced an extensively researched and well written book. It has always been very clear that Scottsboro stood for much more than the actual case. As Carter says in his preface: "For most white Southerners it raised the spectre of Communist subversion and racial insubordination; for Negroes it was a mirror which reflected the three hundred years of mistreatment they had suffered at the hands of white America; Communists and other radicals saw Scottsboro as the inevitable offspring of an economic system based upon racism and class exploitation; and for American liberals it became a tragic symbol of the sickness which pervaded the South's regional culture".