The Martinsville Seven

This is a careful exposition of a notorious Virginia case that led to the 1951 electrocution of seven young black men convicted of raping a white woman. Rise, who teaches sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware, first sketches the Jan. 8, 1949, attack of Ruby Floyd in a black neighborhood in the western Virginia town of Martinsville. The black community, he notes, was shocked not by the convictions but by the death sentences. The NAACP and a discomfiting rival, the left-wing Civil Rights Congress, campaigned against the convictions. The author charges that the judicial system, which rejected several appeals, ignored the climate of ``hostility and prejudice'' against the defendants, valuing social order over due process. Most important, the appeals marked the NAACP's first attempt to use equal-protection arguments (previously cited in desegregation cases) to challenge racially disparate sentences. Such arguments persist today. Photos. (June)