Scottsboro: An American Tragedy

Riveting and compelling, this documentary tells a crucial episode in the often-forgotten prehistory of the civil rights movement. In the early years of the Great Depression, nine Black youths were charged with raping two white women on a train near Scottsboro, Alabama. The Communist Party, the NAACP and Alabama segregationists all saw the case as a test of American apartheid. One of the era’s most famous attorneys, Samuel Liebowitz, fresh from defending Al Capone, led the defense, but Liebowitz himself became one of the accused as a “Jewish carpetbagger” and frontman for Communists. Filled with exciting characters - including the defendants, Communist organizers, segregationist leaders, the two alleged rape victims and Liebowitz himself- the film reveals the intensity and limits of Black-Jewish relations and sympathies.

Daniel Anker, an Academy Award nominee and Emmy winner for the film Scottsboro: An American Tragedy, has produced or directed numerous documentaries and specials, mostly for PBS. Most recently he produced and directed two new documentary projects: Imaginary Witness, which premiered at the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival, and Music From the Inside Out, a feature documentary with the musicians of The Philadelphia Orchestra. Scottsboro: An American Tragedy, which he produced and co-directed, premiered at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival and won numerous festival awards throughout the United States and abroad prior to its Oscar nomination. A graduate of Harvard University with a degree in music, Anker has previously produced numerous award-winning music programs, including the Peabody Award-winning children’s series Marsalis on Music, which was broadcast on PBS, the BBC and BRAVO. He was also producer for three seasons of the PBS series THE METROPOLITAN OPERA PRESENTS and produced broadcasts of Parsifal, Elektra, Stiffelio, I Lombardi, Falstaff, La Fanciulla del West, and the world premiere of The Ghosts of Versailles. Additionally, Anker produced the PBS pledge perrenial A Carnegie Hall Christmas Concert. He was associate producer of Julie Taymor’s filmed version of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, shot at the Saito Kinen Festival in Matsumoto Japan, and the Emmy Award-winning Tchaikovsky 150th Gala from Leningrad. Other documentary credits include the Emmy-nominated AMERICAN EXPERIENCE film Daley, the Last Boss (co-producer), the short The Magic of La Guardia (producer/director), and a series about campaign finance reform for THE NEWSHOUR WITH JIM LEHRER (field producer). Anker produced new documentary material for the PBS rebroadcast of the historic Horowitz in Moscow with Charles Kuralt, and several segments for the Emmy Award-winning series City Arts. He was associate producer of the first two seasons of the PBS series Bookmark, the LIFETIME special Abortion: An American Controversy, and the cinema-verite film Abbado in Berlin (with Maysles Films). Anker's additional awards and honors include a Peabody Award, four national Emmy Award nominations, the Erik Barnouw Award from the Organization of American Historians, and multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts., Barak Goodman Director, writer, producer In twelve years of producing documentaries, Barak Goodman has received every major industry award: the Peabody, duPont-Columbia, National Emmy, and an Academy Award nomination. Two of his films for PBS’s American Experience were selected for the documentary competition by the Sundance Film Festival: "Scottsboro: An American Tragedy" (Sundance 2000), and "The Fight" (Sundance 2004), which will be broadcast on American Experience in the 2004-05 season For the PBS series Frontline, Goodman has co-produced with wife Rachel Dretzin "The Lost Children of Rockdale County," "Merchants of Cool," and the series "Failure to Protect," which was recently awarded the duPont-Columbia. Goodman and John Maggio are co-producing with Twin Cities Public Television a documentary on 1950s sex researcher Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey for American Experience. Goodman is a graduate of Harvard University.