The Pendragon's Hall

Out to dinner with a friend this past Wednesday night, the Pendragon noted on a TV screen that one of the Duke lacrosse players falsely accused of raping a black stripper has transferred to Loyola. And why not? It was indeed the Scottsboro Trials all over again: a group of young men accused of rape by lying witnesses on the basis of race. The only difference was that at Scottsboro, the victims were black and their lying accusers were white. The crimes in the South are still the same; but the race of the victim has changed. The fabrication of these stories by a black stripper and a white DA up for re-election is another sorry stain on the pages of American racial history. The Pendragon is absolutely disgusted. I thought perhaps we had gotten beyond this. In Scottsboro, three white sluts accused some black boys riding the rails of rape--nobody noted that the women were ladies about town, with DNA in them from some white men they'd met in a tavern somewhere. The Duke boys faced the same kind of pressure. Some of them weren't even at the party, it turns out. While the Pendragon sincerely hopes that the boys will learn their lesson about inviting strippers over, the fact remains they were falsely accused by a woman who, in the words of one columnist, had more DNA in her than a Red Cross refrigerator! But credibility of witnesses and defendents still doesn't matter. What matters is keeping race at the forefront of everything we do in this country. Hopefully the public outcry will send Nifong into the outer darkness where he belongs, but the Pendragon remains skeptical that we can truly move forward until we embrace the ideal of a color-blind society.