On the book that helps us think about how the most appalling histories can
happen—and what we can do about it.
As we learn more about the darkest human histories, the toughest question
is often not what happened—as hard as it can certainly be to get at, and then
to understand, historical truths—but how it did. That is, if we’re not willing
to believe that much of humanity is essentially evil (and I definitely am not
willing to believe that), we are left with the question of how, in the case of
so many historical horrors, large numbers of people directly contributed to (and
at least generally supported) them. Probably the most telling example would be
the Holocaust; while there is significant
scholarly disagreement over exactly how much most Germans—or even most in
the Nazi military—knew about the final solution, the very question has led to
extended and important works, such as Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s
Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996).
The same complex and challenging question can be applied to dark, communal
American histories such as the lynching
epidemic or the terrorism of the Ku
Klux Klan—it’s relatively easy to acknowledge racial discrimination and
violence as overall presences on our landscape, but far more difficult to think
about all of the ordinary men and women who comprised those brutal efforts. I know
of no book, scholarly or otherwise, that better engages with precisely that
question than James Goodman’s Stories
of Scottsboro (1994). Goodman’s book narrates the dark and tragic
history of the Scottsboro Boys,
nine African American men who were falsely accused of raping two white women on
an Alabama train, railroaded (pun intended) into convictions
and then (after the Supreme Court twice vacated the verdict) re-convictions,
and wrongfully imprisoned for years (with one dying in prison and the others
all dramatically affected in their own ways by the experience). But Goodman
goes one step further—through a combination of deep research and (limited but
effective) imaginative extension, he constructs the perspectives of many of
those involved in the case, including the two accusers (one of whom eventually
recanted), the authorities who prosecuted the boys, and those who served on the
juries that repeatedly convicted them.
It would be possible for such a kaleidoscopic approach to make it seem as
if there’s no such thing as historical truth, but through a deliberate
balancing act Goodman does the opposite: keeping the case’s most significant
truths in front of us, while at the same time helping us to see how those truths
could be elided, ignored, and destroyed by so many Americans for so many years.
That the boys’ persecutors come across as complex and even sympathetic figures
does not lessen in any way the horror of what happened to the boys—but it does
make those events a bit more understandable. And as a result, I would argue
that Goodman’s book offers an implicit model for how we can respond to such
dark histories—not by turning them into mythologized narratives of good and
evil, with their accompanying comforting but also limiting effects; but instead
by engaging directly with how we (and I do mean “we”) come to support, take
part in, and produce such histories. We cannot change the past’s injustices,
but we can confront them, and what they tell us about our own capability for
injustice as well.
Next case tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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