March 30, 2001

An Insider's View of 'Scottsboro'

By JAMES GOODMAN

When I was in graduate school, my classmates and I, observing how small the world of academic history could be, joked about starting a journal. We would call it The New York Review of Our Own Books, and in it we would, needless to say, review our own books.

Well, life often imitates art, or imagined art, and two decades later, here I am, reviewing Scottsboro: An American Tragedy, a documentary about the court case and cause célèbre that took the name of the northern