By Tim Wheeler

March 25 was the 70th anniversary of the arrest of nine Black teenagers near Scottsboro, Alabama. Charged with raping two white girls, the young men were arrested and transported by truck to the Jackson County Jail on March 25, 1931. A month later, they were tried before an all-white jury.

The two women, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, testified that the defendants had raped them. With the exception of the youngest, all were condemned to die in Alabama's electric chair. Thus began the struggle to expose the frame-up and save the lives of the Scottsboro defendants.

The Public Broadcasting Corporation commemorated the anniversary April 2 by broadcasting an 84-minute documentary titled "Scottsboro: An American Tragedy." Two New York filmmakers, Daniel Anker and Barak Goodman, produced the documentary, which was nominated for an Academy Award. Together with a similar film, "Scottsboro Boys," produced and aired by Court TV two years ago, these documentaries are introducing a new generation to the Scottsboro case, a struggle that gave birth to the modern civil rights movement. The People's Weekly World provided many still photos for the Court TV film.

Very early, the Anker-Goodman film acknowledges the crucial role of the Communist Party USA in organizing the worldwide crusade that saved the Scottsboro defendants. Mary Licht, historian of the CPUSA, is interviewed briefly in the film. It was part of a much longer interview she had given to the Court TV documentary team. Anker and Goodman might have done better to use more of that interview with Licht.

Licht was a southern organizer for the International Labor Defense (ILD), a committee set up by the CPUSA at the time of the Scottsboro frame-up. Licht visited several of the mothers of the Scottsboro Nine and explained to them the ILD's approach, combining the best legal strategy with a mobilization of millions of people across the country.

Licht said that the mothers understood instantly that without this mass mobilization their sons would die in the electric chair. They signed the consent form, allowing the ILD to conduct the defense.

Heavy emphasis is placed in both films on the role of Sam Liebowitz, a brilliant courtroom attorney who blew holes in the lie that the youths had raped the two young women. Yet no matter how compelling the evidence, even when Ruby Bates, in the second trial recanted her testimony, the all-white juries invariably returned guilty verdicts. Obviously the ILD's stress on mass mobilization was the real lifeline.

An omission in the Anker-Goodman film is the role of Black Communists such as William L. Patterson, a leader of the ILD. Failure to mention his role makes it seem that the ILD was dominated by white lawyers, but, in fact, Patterson, an attorney who had helped in the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, was one of the key strategists.

The film does feature dramatic archival footage of the defendants' mothers' worldwide speaking tours to save their sons.

Lloyd Brown, a former Communist Party member, speaks of the Party's analysis: Defense of the Scottsboro Nine would become the rallying point for a nationwide struggle to complete the American revolution that began in 1776 and was further advanced by the Civil War. The "unfinished task" was to break the back of racist segregation in the South and clear the way for racial equality.

The U.S. Supreme Court handed down landmark rulings in the Scottsboro trials, including a decision that all-white juries violate the Constitution. Landmark legal cases by definition have an impact far beyond the particular parties involved.

The Party and ILD organizers who went south in those Depression years were at considerable risk of losing their lives. So were the Communists who were already there, like Black steelworker Hosea Hudson of Birmingham. Communists were in the frontline of this epic battle for democracy and deserve to be honored for their historic contributions.

Those still photos from 70 years ago of the young men in Alabama's atrocious Kilby Prison evoke a haunting thought. Have things changed so much? What about the million inmates in our prisons today? How many were railroaded like the Scottsboro Nine?

Journalism students at Northwestern University exposed the frame-up of several African-American inmates on Illinois' death row, forcing the governor to release them.

And what of the Bush brothers, Jeb and Dubya, both practitioners of "lethally injected" justice. Is there a nickel's worth of difference between them and Alabama Attorney General Thomas Knight, who framed the Scottsboro Nine?