- Studio: Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)
- Release Date: Jan 19, 2001
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Scottsboro: An American Tragedy
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- Starring: Frances McDormand, Stanley Tucci
- Summary: Covering several decades, this documentary examines the Scottsboro case, an often-overlooked chapter in our nation’s history. The case centered on nine black men, ages thirteen to nineteen, who were accused of raping two young white women while riding the rails in Alabama in 1931.
- Director: Barak Goodman
- Genre(s): Documentary
- More Details and Credits »
Score distribution:
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Positive: 7 out of 8
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Mixed: 1 out of 8
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Negative: 0 out of 8
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100Film makers Barak Goodman and Daniel Anker dig deep into the story and its ramifications, exposing how the twin evils of racism and anti-Semitism combined to foment institutional injustice, and led — if a silver lining could be found — to the triumphs of the civil-rights movement two and three decades later.
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80The first full-scale documentary about the history of those years, and it lays out lucidly the involvement of the Communist Party in the young men's defense and the ways in which the trials, against the backdrop of the Depression, replayed the murderous quarrels of the Civil War all over again.
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80Barak Goodman and Daniel Anker have done a tremendous job of sorting the facts from a tangle of fictions, and include perspectives from a wide variety of experts and testimonies from a surprising number of surviving eyewitnesses. Together, they do the whole, horrible episode justice, something awfully hard to come by in the state of Alabama in 1931.
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52As fascinating as the case is as history, however, Scottsboro: An American Tragedy is a TV show, not a movie.