As I keep saying:
One day we’re gonna find out that the Scottsboro Boys were guilty.
This guy — to who’s estate Bob Dylan really owes some royalty dough — was never in doubt:
…despite principles often indistinguishable from those of a liberal, he hated left-wing propaganda as much as any other kind. This antipathy showed up early, in Huie’s personal verdict (guilty) in the case of the “Scottsboro boys”—nine black youths charged with raping two women in an Alabama train car, whose trial became a cause célèbre for the Communist Party in particular. Some of Huie’s harshest later writings focused on liberal crusades that sought to correct generations of injustice by elevating criminals and demeaning their victims—criminals like Caryl Chessman, the California “red-light bandit” sentenced to death for forcing “unnatural sex acts” upon two women, the man whose 12-year death watch ended in a 1960 execution opposed by an unprecedented number of celebrity and civilian protesters. In “Myth of the Martyr Rapist,” Huie examined the prosecution’s evidence and found it solid; analyzed Chessman’s character and found it sociopathic; interviewed the victims and found them scarred; and concluded that the milk of liberal kindness was curdling in a “wave of sick sentimentality.”
Similar dynamics, he felt, lay behind the sensational case of Mack Charles Parker—“The Rape-Lynch That Rocked America,” as Huie’s report was (sensationally) titled. Parker, a black man, raped a white woman in a stalled car on a stretch of dark Mississippi road in 1959, while her seven-year-old daughter cowered on the floor inches away. Parker was identified, abducted, and lynched by a gang of white men. The atrocity of mob justice was, to Huie, so manifest as to obscure another injustice—namely, the martyrdom of the rapist and revictimization of the victim via slanders from the left. Huie condemned those who sought to twist the facts of the case, even in righteous cause.
Alas, we also have Huie to blame, at least in part, for the “Southerners are evil”/”Goodman, Cheney and Schwerner: not dead enough” America we seem to be stuck with.
PS: in this general spirit, let’s not forget the William F. Buckley championed a criminal, too.
Another reason I never liked the man.
After the hearing, William F. Buckley sent a limousine to pick up Smith from the Couthouse and whisked him to the studio where Smith appeared on Buckley’s television program, the Firing Line. Smith went on a lecture tour of college campuses, earning thousands of dollars in fees and publishing numerous articles in various newspapers and magazines.
(This seems to be “Kathy bashes right wing men” day. My apologies.)
