A Woman's False Accusation Pains Many Blacks - New York Times
It just goes to show that racism is alive and well and free in America," said Inez Chappell, a 67-year-old retired manicurist in Baltimore who grew up on stories of the Scottsboro Boys, the 1930's case of nine black teen-agers falsely accused of raping two white women.
On a street corner in Harlem, not far from where countless rallies for the Scottsboro Boys were held, Michael Major, a 29-year-old security guard, said it made him sad that desperate people think blaming blacks will solve their problems.
"It's kind of upsetting after a while," he said, "and it gets to be very stressful."
Experts say the lies the 23-year-old mother told to cover her trail fit a long history of scapegoating black men for the ills of the nation.
"This case demonstrates once again the stereotypical view of black men in America, that they are other, that they are dangerous, that they should be imprisoned," said Aldon Morris, who is black and the head of the sociology department at Northwestern University.
"And this view, of course, is nothing new," he said. "It was the same view that guided lynch mobs during the days of segregation in the South. It is the same view that causes black men to be stopped, searched and harassed on a routine basis by the police."
But the voices bemoaning the power of racial lies do not belong only to blacks.