Little George remembered how, as a boy in 1968 (that year of rage), his father had brought him to political rallies in Michigan. The old seg's third-party presidential campaign had a northern constituency now, blue-collar workers boiling mad at Washington and liberals and race agitators and "pointy-headed intellectuals."
The raw violence of those northern rallies terrified Little George. "I watched my father set those men on fire," he said in quiet wonder. "Just set them on fire!" The entire year 1968 was a Molotov cocktail.
Little George and I did not talk that night about the Scottsboro Boys — about the famous case that had put Scottsboro on the map at the beginning of the Depression.
It is now exactly 70 years since those nine black teenagers, the Scottsboro Boys, were arrested. On Monday, PBS will broadcast a documentary about the case by two filmmakers, Daniel Anker and Barak Goodman.
The Scottsboro case (like, say, the Sacco-Vanzetti affair or the Scopes Monkey Trial) was an item of Americana famous long ago. The nine black teenagers were on a freight train headed for Memphis, where they hoped to find work. Depression times. There were white youths hoboing on the train as well. North of Scottsboro, a fight broke out between blacks and whites. When the train reached Paint Rock, an armed posse of whites was waiting, and Ruby Bates, 17, and Victoria Price, 21, two white girls who were on the train and may have been selling sex to boys of both races, told the police that the blacks had raped them.
A mob in Scottsboro demanded that the boys be lynched. An all-white jury condemned all but one of them to death. In the ensuing years they went through 16 trials (either singly or together), waiting sometimes on death row, serving prison terms of six to nearly 17 years. None was ever executed. One of the girls recanted later and became a defender of the accused blacks.
Which victims do you sympathize with, the white girls or the black boys?
How rich and murky and painful are these stories. If you are wise, you climb down from the soapbox of ideology and try to see them steadily.
In 70 years, the planet has revolved a few times on its axis. I thought of Little George Wallace up in Scottsboro, which is a lovely southern town in the hilly northeast part of the state, great for fishing and raising children. I thought of Little George's demagogue racist father, Governor George Wallace, who — after he was shot while campaigning for president in 1972, and confined in great pain to a wheelchair, paralyzed — was overcome by sweeter impulses of contrition and brotherhood. He asked blacks for their forgiveness, and they — a lot of them — graciously gave it.
I have been thinking as well about U.S. District Court judge Bernard Friedman's decision this week striking down race as a criterion for admission to the University of Michigan Law School.
It was a sharp, clear, good decision. It may help the law catch up to the realities of a highly diverse America 70 years after Scottsboro — a nation no longer binary (black and white, as on that northbound Alabama train) but multicolored, multiethnic and badly in need now of a return to the solid principle that judging persons by their race is inherently invidious, and wrong.
Diversity is not an agenda or an ideology. Today, it is the dominant American fact. That reality needs intelligent law to organize it.
Scottsboro still speaks, of course. But the immense diversity of America, this global carnival of DNA, is not well served by quotas and archaic pieties of race — of race seen in mere black and white. Time to move on.