Smoke Signals from Samarcand

This slim book elegantly recounts the 1931 trial of sixteen white, teenaged, female inmates accused of setting fire to the Samarcand Manor Training School for Delinquent Girls in rural North Carolina. Reformers founded Samarcand in 1917. “The school is doing wonderful work,” the Charlotte Observer gushed in 1922, but by the early 1930s, Samarcand had become so unbearable that inmates set it ablaze, hoping to escape. The young “match-strikers” were prosecuted for arson, a capital crime. Their lawyer, Nell Battle Lewis, was a reformer whose extensive pretrial research provides much of the book's evidence. Lewis's defense strategy was to unmask the terrible conditions at Samarcand that prompted the girls to set the fire. Lewis succeeded in getting most observers to view the girls as victims of state abuse. In court, however, she was less successful. The state let four of the defendants go but sent the other twelve to prison for five years. Lewis had hoped for more leniency. Her efforts, however, were not in vain, as they produced substantial reform at Samarcand

Ancient history · Arson · Battle · Criminology · Political science · Prison · Sociology · State (computer science · American Political and Social Dynamics · History · Homelessness and Social Issues · Law · Race, History, and American Society