Left-Wing Revisionism

2,488 words

Liberals often derogatorily accuse anybody who does not faithfully accept every dogmatic piece of history and the “official story” as a revisionist. Some of these accusations have come my way over the years, which in turn got me thinking about all of the instances of legal and historical revisionism by the Left. Examples of this are legion, enough to fill at least an entire book or two spanning the length of recorded history.

With that, I’d like to offer a handful of poignant examples from the 20th century of the re-telling of history and the effect of pardoning people for horrible crimes decades later. These examples intertwine in various ways as they involve media representations, law, and history.

First, A Time To Kill, the John Grisham novel which was made into a film, which Grisham has described as “very autobiographical,” is based on real crime testimony that Grisham witnessed. The novel and film take place in a small Mississippi town where two white racists brutally rape a ten-year-old black girl. This is the crime that Grisham says was similar to the case he witnessed as a young man. In A Time To Kill, the black father of the girl kills her white rapists, then is chased by the Ku Klux Klan, deals with other assorted racism, and is eventually acquitted. The real case that inspired this novel and film is Harris v. The State of Mississippi, and it’s the case of when Willie James Harris, a black man, broke into the house of sisters Julie and Marcie Scott, 16 and 12 years old, robbed, beat, and raped them. This incident occurred in the afternoon, around 2:00 PM, on a July day in 1984, in Southhaven, Mississippi. A black man raped and nearly killed two white girls in their home in the middle of the day, and out of that case, hearing the testimony of one of the girls, Grisham writes A Time to Kill. This was turned into a large-scale film production by Joel Schumacher and Akiva Goldsman, with a budget of $40 million in 1996. They took a horrible and all too common crime, inverted it all, packaged it up, and sold it to not only make money, but to shape racial thought in America in a wholly warped fashion incongruent with the reality of crime trends.[1]

Before A Time To Kill, there was To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Again, a southern town, this time in Alabama. Another rape case, this time a black man, Tom Robinson, accused of raping a white woman, Mayella Ewell. At the trial in the novel and film, we learn that Mayella actually made sexual advances to the black defendant, yet Robinson was found guilty anyway because of the racist Southern jury. The plot here is a total inversion of reality, the opposite of what actually occurs in the real world every day that we have to live with.

Unlike Grisham, Lee claims the story was not inspired by a real case, yet cites a case her father worked on in 1919, when he defended two black men on trial for murder. The defendants were convicted and executed. The 1919 case was about Frank and Brown Ezell, a father and son who killed an elderly storekeeper in Monroeville, Alabama. I found no evidence about this case being decided incorrectly; it seems it left a scar on Lee’s father, obviously showing extreme liberal sensibilities to being soft on crime over 100 years ago.[2]

The other case that appears as a potential influence for Lee’s novel is the infamous Scottsboro Boys trial in 1932, Powell v. Alabama. In 1931, nine black teenagers raped two white girls, as they tend to do. Eight of black teens were found guilty of rape at trial. The Communist Party USA and the NAACP became involved, appealed the cases to the U.S. Supreme Court on grounds that they were not given an impartial jury or proper legal representation, and new trials were ordered. At the new trials, the teens were again found guilty, yet the judge ordered a new trial. During the third trial, they were again found guilty. More appeals would follow, eventually charges would be dropped for four of the defendants, with five of them convicted.

The Communist Party USA hired Samuel Leibowitz and Joseph Brodsky for the defense of the Scottsboro boys. I’d like to note that the idea that leftists were ever a champion of “workers’ rights” should be further disabused by this fact. There was never a question of workers’ rights or any such topics in these trials. Even in the 1930s, communists were propping up black criminals. Those convicted of the rapes would all later be pardoned, with no evidence of their innocence put forward. Again, these are the types of cases that inspired Harper Lee to write what amounts to negro fan-fiction.

The plot of To Kill a Mockingbird is based on a false crime allegation, which does happen a lot, like when Jews vandalize their own houses, Muslim women claim someone pulled their hijab, or blacks claim to be victims of racism, and intentionally takes that and applies it to a crime that does actually happen a lot – white women being violently attacked by black men – in an attempt to obfuscate the issue as a way to undermine how common black on white crime is in society. Without this book being required reading by nearly every liberal 9th-grade teacher in the country, it would just be another piece of insane fiction. Yet it now has lasting and real-world consequences regarding race, crime, and the justice system.

The saga of Emmett Till has been revised in several ways, including a $20 million film, books, and documentaries. [3] The film Till depicts that he only ever whistled at Carolyn Bryant, instead of physically groping her. Till had no father as Louis Till had been executed for rape and murder in Italy while serving in the US Army during the Second World War. While in Mississippi visiting family, Emmett Till spent time harassing local women, just like his dad. Till was then found by Bryant’s husband, Roy, and Roy’s brother J.W. Milam, and beaten to death.

Historian at Duke University, Timothy Tyson, wrote a book about the events called The Blood of Emmett Till and has claimed in an interview with Bryant that she made up the story about Till’s sexual advances and harassment at her shop that day. Tyson claims that although the entire interview was recorded, that particular part, where Bryant claims it was made up, happened to not be recorded, as he was still setting up his equipment.

I am not suggesting feeling a woman up is grounds for murdering Till, which is why I find the revisionism odd here. The film and book claim Till was not sexually harassing Bryant. But why? Reasonable people will say that beating somebody to death over groping a woman is an injustice in itself. The fear and anger of dealing with blacks harassing you or somebody you care about is legitimate – but killing over it is extreme. Perhaps Bryant and Milam thought they were preventing a future rape at the hands of Till. And maybe they were. Maybe it was to send a message. Either way, I am not seeking to relitigate that aspect, but to show how the case of Till has been revised further over the years.

Leo Frank, now the infamous nexus for the creation of the Anti-Defamation League, has been the subject of leftist revisionism primarily through the legal process.[4] A plaque at the site of where Frank was lynched reads “Wrongly accused. Falsely convicted. Wantonly murdered.” Frank was killed in 1915 and pardoned in 1986. The work of a Rabbi named Steven Lebow, born years after Frank died, led to the posthumous pardon. Nobody involved in the pardon had any additional knowledge of the case, and they were much further removed from the crime and trial than the people who found Frank guilty.

For those who are unaware, Leo Frank was a Jewish pencil factory superintendent. A thirteen-year-old girl named Mary Phagan worked at the factory where she was raped and killed. Phagan’s father passed away before she was born, which is likely the reason she was working so many hours in the Georgia factory. Frank attempted to frame Jim Conley, a black janitor at the factory, for the rape and murder of Phagan. Frank had Conley write the notes left at the crime scene and clean some of the blood from the crime. Detectives pieced all of this together rather quickly, and Frank went to trial, where the main defense was to convince the jury that Conley was the culprit. Frank was found guilty after just a few hours of deliberation on August 25, 1913.

Following the trial, Frank’s lawyers pursued several appeals for nearly two years, which ended with Frank’s murder conviction being commuted to life imprisonment by then-Governor John Slaton. Community outrage ensued, and a group of men plotted to abduct Frank from prison and carry out his original sentence. On August 16, 1915, a convoy of eight vehicles arrived at Milledgeville prison. They cut telephone wires, drained gasoline from the prison automobiles, handcuffed the warden, and took Frank from his cell. The convoy then drove through the backroads of Georgia through the night to Frey’s Gin, not far from the pencil factory. They hanged Frank at dawn the next morning.

The Anti-Defamation League was formed in reaction to this affair. Rabbi Lebow and the ADL worked to have Frank pardoned, not due to evidence exonerating him, but because the state failed to protect Frank properly.

There is a pattern of state governors pardoning people posthumously seventy years or more after the original proceedings. That alone raises many questions. What was the purpose of the pardon if not historic revision? Was there new evidence unearthed? Did any of these governors know anything about the cases at all? If not, pure revisionism had to be the goal.

Many cases from across the country follow this pattern: The Martinsville Seven (Virginia), The Groveland Four (Florida), and George Stinney Jr. (South Carolina). All of these cases involve black men killing or raping white women and being found guilty at trial. And all were later pardoned, citing things like “racial bias,” “lack of due process,” or the jury being all white.[5] These pardons and revisions are not based on things such as finding the convicted person was innocent because of modern DNA comparisons or some other substantial piece of evidence, but on vague excuses such as finding somebody made a “racist” comment about the horrible crimes committed. They are not being pardoned due to their innocence or being found not guilty, but because of latter-day notions of racism and what is considered “due process.” In modern legal parlance, “due process” seems to mean allowing violent criminals to make appeals until they are eventually allowed to go free. In the Stinney trial, because it was not a long and drawn out proceeding, it is now assumed to have been unfair or flawed in some way. Liberals have construed due process into a sort of catch-all where they can exhaust procedural remedies and totally ignore substantive justice. They do not really seem to care if a criminal actually committed the crime or not; if there was some minor issue with the procedural process, they view that as innocent, but only when it is about letting violent blacks and foreigners go. When it comes to their enemies, they will use the procedure as punishment, even when the person is substantially innocent.

Liberals have now loosely construed due process to mean drawn out legal proceedings that take years, a litany of automatic appeals, lobbying to ask the governor for a pardon, or the next governor, or the one after that, and the chance to be let go due to a technical procedural issue or maybe even something vaguer like the notion that a juror was “racist,” or otherwise, due process and justice, were denied. If all of that doesn’t work, decades later, somebody can claim due process was denied, and people with zero connection to the case might grant a pardon. Further, the weaponization of due process means we see instances where justice is delayed for one person, leaving them in a legal limbo or worse, for years, while a delay for somebody else works in their favor.

Historically, due process meant that life, freedom, property, rights, or some other legitimate interest a person has will not be summarily taken from them by the government. It was written as a protection from arbitrary and inexact legal proceedings and the whims of individuals. The idea being, if a citizen could possibly be deprived of something, they are entitled to a formal procedure designed to protect them from the deprivation.

When a suspect is clearly guilty, in the case of something being on video, a confession, or irrefutable evidence to the point the state can easily prove their case, with no dispute of fact, a point is reached where further proceedings become performative and serve to inhibit justice, and the process is no longer “due” to the defendant.

The film and book industries are swarming with instances of fiction that masquerade as legitimately historical. Remember the Titans, Crash, Schindler’s List, Night by Eli Wiesel, The Boy in Striped Pajamas, The Pianist, and the like. They all exist to reinforce the left-wing narrative of the Second World War, segregation, and liberal ideas of anti-racism. There are scant mainstream alternatives that offer a right-wing or even neutral perspective. When an illiberal view is offered, it’s immediately labeled as “revisionist” by the left, which serves as a sort of thought-termination device for many and is discarded as illegitimate.

Ending the liberal control of historic narratives is difficult, as not only do they actively produce the content that many people consume, which shapes their views on events, but when there is something that goes against their ideas on history, they seek to revise the event with legal pardons and subversive storytelling. Recognizing how this operates and realizing the left engages in constant revisionism, as they decry those who disagrees as a revisionist themselves, is a substantial act towards a better understanding of history and how views are shaped today.

Notes

[1] Jerry Mitchell. “A ‘cold blooded’ crime in Mississippi inspired ‘A Time To Kill,’ John Grisham says.” Clarion Ledger. October 21, 2018.

Harris v. State. Justia US Law.

[2] Doug Cornett. “Big Picture, Small Picture: Context for Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.” Ploughshares at Emerson College. July 10, 2016.

[3] Jerry Mitchell. “Bombshell quote missing from Emmett Till tape. So did Carolyn Bryant Donham really recant?” The Herald- Mail. August 21, 2018. 

[4] Jim Auchmutey. “Chasing Justice: A rabbi’s single-minded mission to exonerate Leo Frank.” Atlanta Magazine. March 27, 2025. 

[5] Analysis of juries and race finds that blacks exhibit statistically more bias in trials than white jurors. See: Mitchell and Meissner. “Racial Bias in Mock Juror Decision-Making: A Meta-Analytic Review of Defendant Treatment.” Law and Human Behavior. December 2005.