When two white women accused nine black teenagers of raping them on an Alabama bus in 1931, their claims set off a chain reaction that eventually reached the Supreme Court -- and launched the … Not to back Alabamians off but to harden and toughen the resistance to any kind of fair trial. In 1931, two white women stepped off from a box car in Paint Rock, Alabama to make a shocking accusation: they had been raped by nine black teenagers on the train. CARTER: He turns to the jury, points his finger to the jury and says: 'Show them that Alabama justice can't be bought and sold with Jew money from New York!' LEIBOWITZ: The spermatozoa were non-motile, that means they were dead. Leibowitz: Did Victoria tell you what would happen to you if you didn't follow her story? Julie Dretzin But that's the footnote to this story. Much of that resentment was directed at Leibowitz himself. I have received numerous crank letters threatening death if I don't stop. In the early 1930's the incidents of lynchings in the South had spiked upward, tracking the economic misery of poor whites. All nine boys were sent back to Kilby's death house. The jury could not decide whether to sentence thirteen year-old Roy Wright to life-in-prison or death. CO-DIRECTED BY Daniel Anker. GRIGG: Mr. Broadway sent up to the store to get a skein, I never did hear that word before, a skein of ploughline, and the rope was cut into pieces where they could tie the hands of the ones that was under arrest. But the communists had found Southern blacks deeply rooted in the system. All those colored boys raped us.' Sign up for the American Experience newsletter! Buy a cheap copy of Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American... book by Dan T. Carter. On one of the white women's death bed, she told the truth. Grover Hall, editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, once one of the most ardent defenders of the Scottsboro verdicts, began to wonder if something had not gone terribly wrong. And Patterson says well I didn't do it but they did it. J is for Junkie. And he had a sense of timing that Jack Benny would have envied. Critical thinking. We had literally tens of thousands of people who were bound to the farm in debt, work all year, at the end of the year they would have nothing left. Whatever Leibowitz had been when he entered the case, he was now a different man. CARTER: When that jury brought in that verdict of guilty, everyone said he looked like someone had struck him. It was that he'd never had a witness that said over and over I 'can't remember'. We were using the Scottsboro case to expose what was going on in the South. And the next thing was, how we going to get them to Scottsboro? Norris would lay awake listening to the midnight executions. Robin Kelley And so that's the way they explode. Don't stir it up again. Rerecording Mixer Michigan Chronicle In Harlem, thousands had closely followed the events in Alabama; the verdict shocked and radicalized many. Alabama authorities immediately resolved to retry, reconvict, and execute the nine defendants. Ruby Bates had spent the months before the trial in hiding -- as far from the media glare, and the clutches of the prosecution and defense as she could get. Louder: No! New York Daily News As the trial resumed, the tense atmosphere in the courtroom was heightened by a spring heat wave. Paperback. frankfob2@yahoo.com. GOODMAN: So Bates essentially says that she made the whole thing up. Voice: The Advertiser knows, all of its readers know, the whole of this sordid, sickening story. There was no Callie Brochie on Seventh Street in Chattanooga. I hung my hat on a little limb and went to having intercourse with Ruby... by firelight I saw Victoria's boyfriend had intercourse with her. They immediately send word of this up to party headquarters in New York saying this is a wonderful opportunity to publicize all the things we're trying to publicize in the South. If I didn't make up the story then we would have to go to jail. The Scottsboro Defense Committee was formed on December 19, 1935, with the objective to provide a united defense for the Scottsboro defendants. He literally could have been an actor. Judge Horton had retreated to his farm in Limestone County after the verdict. The boys' cells were separated by a thin door from Kilby's electric chair. GOODMAN: Leibowitz now cross-examines him and over the course of that cross-examination essentially turns him into a witness for the defense. BRYAN STEVENSON, Attorney: What Scottsboro teaches us is that you cannot underestimate the power of our history as it relates to race, as it relates to poverty, as it relates to sectionalism, in the struggle for justice. Stop! I remember that. Opportunistic and organized, they seized on the Depression as proof of the inevitable decline of capitalism and the rise of a workers' paradise. But to many Southerners, it had been a deep affront. They started to fight with one another. Swift Add the first question. Scottsboro: An American Tragedy movie reviews & Metacritic score: Covering several decades, this documentary examines the Scottsboro case, an often-overlooked chapter in our nation’s history. PERRY BRUSKIN, Former Activist: Will you let them murder the nine Negro boys in Scottsboro? MILLS THORNTON, Historian: As the train emerged from the tunnel under Lookout Mountain, a group of whites was moving along the top of the train and they stepped on the hand of one of the blacks and almost knocked him off the train. I had nothing to do with any of them.". Performed by The New York City Labor Chorus, "The Scottsboro Boys" He had a responsibility now to make sure that the world understood that those nine defendants in 1931 were innocent and that it was racism, only racism, that in fact forced them to spend all those years in prison. But inside, their lawyers were appealing the Scottsboro verdict before the Supreme Court of the United States. While considered a tragic miscarriage of justice, wrongful convictions GOODMAN: He finds dozens, scores of inconsistencies. This is "Scottsboro: An American Tragedy - Trailer" by API FILMS on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them. GOODMAN: He wanted to make a name for himself that was larger than the criminal's lawyer. All the others were sentenced to die in the Alabama electric chair. Screen Reader Users: To optimize your experience with your screen reading software, please use our Flixster.com website, which has the same tickets as our Fandango.com and MovieTickets.com websites. Cinematographer Tom Hurwitz talks about documentary filmmaking and his unique experience filming in Scottsboro, Alabama where his father, documentarian Leo Hurwitz, had shot nearly 70 years before. LEIBOWITZ: He objected. Very conscious of proper procedure in a courtroom. The tragedy of this are nine boys lives hopelessly, eternally interrupted, sent cascading down roads of terror and imprisonment. Jen Scaturro, Additional Sound For a moment, the freed defendants were treated like celebrities; they were taken on a speaking tour and booked into the Apollo Theater where they sang, danced, and took part in a reenactment of their trial. The producers, Daniel Anker and Barak Goodman, give viewers access to the Scottsboro story from many vantage points. BROWN: She spoke many times and told of the great wrong that she had done and that she was concerned that these boys' lives should not be lost on account of her. They were junior partners in the American experiment, that they were not fully accepted as citizens of the United States. Despite amending the Constitution with the 14th amendment, black people were still openly discriminated against in all parts of American society. 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