I used to know a lot about the Scottsboro boys, having read a paperback autobiography of Samuel Leibowitz, the attorney retained by the CP, I believe for the re-trials ordered by the Supreme Court. It was such a long time ago that I had to Google the Scottsboro Boys just to retrieve Leibowitz' name, which I had forgotten. Google reminded me once again of the courage of Matt Wann, the local sheriff who had faced down a lynch mob , proving that there were, even then, some decent white Southerners (probably one in a hundred thousand but still . . .)
The thing that I never forgot from the book was Leibowitz' arrival in the small town where the retrial was going to be held, surrounded in his hotel by a mob bearing signs that said "Kill the Jew from New York" and the hospitality shown to him by the prosecutor and his wife in their own home, to the outrage of the townsfolk. (OK, three in a hundred thousand)
Incidentally, from Googling for Leibowitz' name, I found there's a huge amount of information easily available about the case, which even has its own web-site. From the Wikipedia article alone, I was able to find photos of many of the participants in the case, including the two girls Ruby and Victoria, who were not exactly hothouse flowers even as teenagers. It was pretty hard to imagine either one of them exciting the baser passions in anyone except a sailor who'd been at sea for . . . oooops, sorry, plane!
