Nearly lynched, quickly tried and sentenced to death for supposedly raping two white women in a railroad car near Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931, the Scottsboro boys symbolized, in literature, law, and the minds of many, the desperate situation of southern African American men. Several writers, including Countee Cullen and S. Ralph Harlow, wrote in response to this incident, but none more significantly than Langston Hughes.
In his small volume, Scottsboro Limited (1932), Hughes presented this case as an exemplar of larger ethical, moral, and economic issues. In “Justice,” Hughes gives infected eyes to the blind Justice of U.S. jurisprudence, reshaping a foundational figure of impartiality and reasoned judgment as an image of physical and ethical decay. In “Christ in Alabama,” he casts violent and sexual overtones over the relation of a light-skinned God to a darker-skinned Mary, thereby asserting that the true sexual aggressor is not a martyred, African American Christ, but a powerful white man. In “Scottsboro,” the imprisoned boys are joined by a series of other freedom fighters, including John Brown, Moses, Jeanne d'Arc Nat Turner, and Lenin. In a more upbeat tone, Hughes's play, Scottsboro Limited, later staged by Amiri Baraka in the 1960s, connects the plight of these nine men with that of white working people, using communist understandings of an oppressed underclass to call for solidarity across racial and along class lines. Hughes symbolizes the communist activists who brought the Scottsboro case into the national spotlight with a chorus of Red voices that continually speak to the boys in their cell. The play ends hopefully with white and black workers pouring on stage, smashing the electric chair, and clasping hands while a red flag is rising. Hughes's volume eloquently illustrates the multiple and complex aspects of the African American experience that Scottsboro briefly brought to the fore.
Bibliography
- Hugh T. Murray, Jr., “Changing America and the Changing Image of Scottsboro,” Phylon
38 (1977): 82–92. - Amiri Baraka, “Staging Langston Hughes's Scottsboro Limited: An Interview with Amiri Baraka,” interview by Veve Clark, Black Scholar
10 (1979): pp. 62–69
—Maggie Sale
