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PRESENTS
The Scottsboro Boys
Music and Lyrics by John Kander and Fred Ebb
Book by David Thompson
Direction and Choreography by Susan Stroman
Associate Director and Choreographer Jeff Whiting
American Conservatory Theater
June 21–July 15 , 2012
WORDS ON PLAYS
vol. xviii, no. 7
Elizabeth Brodersen
Director of Education
Dan Rubin
Publications Manager
Michael Paller
Resident Dramaturg
Emily Hoffman
Publications and Dramaturgy Associate
Amy Krivohlavek
Marketing Writer
Emily Means
Education and Publications Fellow
Made possible by
© 2012 AMERICAN CONSERVATORY THEATER, A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Table of Contents
1
Characters, Cast, and Synopsis of The Scottsboro Boys
4
The Moving Subtext of an American Tragedy
An Interview with Director/Choreographer
Susan Stroman
by Dan Rubin
11
Entertainment with an Edge
Kander and Ebb and the American Musical
by Amy Krivohlavek
17
The Scottsboro Boys
A True Story
by Dan Rubin
24
Scottsboro in Context
by Emily Hoffman
31
“Why the Boys Were Hated”
From “Report on the Scottsboro, Ala. Case”
(May 27, 1931)
by Hollace Ransdell
33
The Pun and the Conundrum of an American
Invention: A Brief History of Minstrelsy
by Dan Rubin
37
Early Dramatizations of the Infamous Trials
by Dan Rubin
40
Rosa Parks and Scottsboro
by Dan Rubin
41
Behind the Characters: Biographies of the Primary
Players in the Scottsboro Case
by Dan Rubin
55
A Scottsboro Boys Timeline
60
Questions to Consider / For Further Information . . .
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iv
Characters, Cast, and Synopsis of
The Scottsboro Boys
The Scottsboro Boys received its world premiere at the Vineyard Theatre in February
2010. In October 2010 it moved to Broadway and was nominated for 12 Tony Awards,
including Best Musical.
Characters and Cast of The Scottsboro Boys
the interlocutor ...................................... Hal Linden
mr. bones ...................................................... Jared Joseph
mr. tambo..................................................... JC Montgomery
the lady....................................................... C. Kelly Wright
The Scottsboro Boys
olen montgomery....................................... David Bazemore
willie roberson .......................................... Cornelius Bethea
eugene williams ......................................... Nile Bullock
andy wright ................................................ Christopher James Culberson
haywood patterson ................................... Clifton Duncan
clarence norris .......................................... Eric Jackson
ozie powell ................................................. James T. Lane
charles weems ............................................ Clifton Oliver
roy wright .................................................. Clinton Roane
Various Other Characters
sheriff/lawyer/attorney general .......... Jared Joseph
deputy/guard/samuel leibowitz.............. JC Montgomery
victoria price ............................................. Clifton Oliver
ruby bates .................................................... James T. Lane
judge/governor of alabama ..................... Hal Linden
electrified charlie ................................... Christopher James Culberson
electrified isaac/billy .............................. Clinton Roane
preacher ...................................................... Eric Jackson
little george .............................................. Nile Bullock
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Synopsis
On an early evening in December 1955, The Lady sits on a bench waiting for a bus. As
she does, she is caught up in a memory. The world around her fades away as a distant minstrel march is heard. One by one, the minstrels greet The Lady. Finally, the
Interlocutor—the master of ceremonies—enters and, in traditional fashion, tells the
minstrels to be seated.
The Interlocutor introduces Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo, who will lead off the
night’s entertainments about the Scottsboro Boys. The proceedings go as planned until
Haywood Patterson asks if tonight, for a change, they can tell the truth. The Interlocutor
agrees, even though Bones and Tambo confess that they have never told the truth before.
The story begins on March 25, 1931, as the nine Scottsboro Boys hop a Memphisbound boxcar in Chattanooga, Tennessee. As the train slows to a stop in Scottsboro,
Alabama, the sheriff (played by Mr. Bones) accuses the nine Scottsboro Boys of instigating a fight with a group of white boys on the train. While searching the train, the handsy
sheriff ’s deputy (played by Mr. Tambo) discovers Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, two
“shimee-shakee harlots,” and threatens to take them to jail. Rather than face jail time, the
girls, led by Victoria, accuse the nine black youths of rape. Almost instantly the sheriff
and deputy’s attitudes toward the women change: they are no longer common whores,
but delicate flowers of the American South, victimized by a gang of black savages. The
Scottsboro Boys are beaten and hauled off to jail. Terrified, Olen Montgomery accuses
the other boys in hopes the guards will let him go. They don’t.
Court is called to order, and the Boys are provided with a drunk, incompetent public
defender. Their trial is swiftly concluded: all nine are found guilty by an all-white jury.
Their executions are set for July 10 at Kilby Prison.
As the boys wait in prison for their execution, they bicker. But when the guards torment 12-year-old Eugene Williams with visions of the electric chair, Haywood comes to
his defense. He commandeers a guard’s gun. It is not loaded, but it is enough to deflect
attention away from the scared child. Some of the Boys celebrate his heroism; others
think he’s reckless.
As a guard leads Haywood to the electric chair, the Interlocutor announces that the
U.S. Supreme Court has granted a new trial because the Boys did not have a proper
lawyer—they’re getting a second chance at life. As the Boys celebrate, the guards take
Haywood to solitary confinement; while there, Roy Wright teaches him the alphabet.
At their retrial, the Boys are defended by a Jewish New York lawyer, Samuel
Leibowitz. On the stand, Ruby admits that she and Victoria lied about the rape. As the
Boys wait for a verdict, the Interlocutor delivers a cake baked by The Lady. The gift
lifts the Boys’ spirits enough that they muse about what they’ll do once they are freed.
Despite the Boys’ momentary optimism, the jury is swayed by the prosecution’s argument that northern “Jew money” bought Ruby’s testimony, and once again convicts the
Boys. The Boys begin work on a chain gang. Haywood attempts to escape to go see his
2
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dying mother, but Olen rats on him and he is caught and returned to solitary confinement.
The Scottsboro case drags on for nearly nine years. With each passing year, each
passing trial, and each guilty verdict, the Boys continue to languish in prison for a crime
they did not commit. In a moment of rage, Ozie Powell tries to strangle a guard with his
handcuffs and is shot in the back of the head. He survives, but with severe brain damage.
Through a deal struck with the prosecutors, Leibowitz is able to secure the freedom
of four of the Scottsboro Boys—Eugene and Roy (the two youngest), Willie Roberson,
and Olen (the rat). Leibowitz promises to continue fighting until the remaining five
are free.
Leibowitz is able to get the condemned Scottsboro Boys an audience with the governor. They’ll be released on parole—if they admit to the governor that they are guilty.
Haywood refuses. The governor returns him to prison.
The Boys briefly tell the story of the rest of their lives—Haywood spent the
remainder of his behind bars, but he writes his autobiography. To close the show, the
Interlocutor tries to get the Boys to do the cakewalk—the customary ending to their
minstrel act. This time, however, they refuse, and one by one they leave the stage.
Haywood, Bones, and Tambo set up a row of chairs in the shape of a bus. As they
leave, they reveal The Lady sitting on the bus. The Interlocutor, as the bus driver, tells her
to move to the back. “No. Not no more,” she replies. “I’m gonna sit here and rest my feet.”
3
The Moving Subtext of an
American Tragedy
An Interview with Director/Choreographer Susan Stroman
By Dan Rubin
Five-time Tony Award winner Susan Stroman believes the success of any musical comes
from great collaboration, and the team she has collaborated with most frequently is
Kander and Ebb. Her first big break in New York came when she choreographed the
1987 off-Broadway revival of Kander and Ebb’s Flora, the Red Menace. She reunited with
them in 1991 for the off-Broadway revue And the World Goes ’Round (which she also
co-conceived) and again in 1997 for the Broadway musical Steel Pier. Not only did they
become great collaborators, but they also became great friends. As she explains: “To have
that kind of freedom and joy with close collaborators is rare in this business.”
In 2002, Stroman, Kander, Ebb, and book writer David Thompson began collaborating on The Scottsboro Boys by seeking out an American story. The project was put on
hold after Ebb’s death in 2004, but the remaining three began working on the project
again in 2008 and produced it at New York’s Vineyard Theatre in early 2010. Later that
year the show moved to Broadway, where it was nominated for 12 Tony Awards. After
the first leg of A.C.T.’s 2012 coproduction of The Scottsboro Boys with The Old Globe
opened to rave reviews in San Diego, Stroman was kind enough to speak with us by
phone about creating the musical and why it is essential that the story of the Scottsboro
Boys is never forgotten.
How did the process of creating The Scottsboro Boys begin?
It started around Fred Ebb’s kitchen table—a very famous kitchen table because it’s
where Chicago was written and Cabaret was written and the song “New York, New York.”
That kitchen table should be in the Smithsonian.
We had done an off-Broadway production of Flora, the Red Menace, where we met,
and we then went on to do a retrospective of Kander and Ebb’s work called And the
World Goes ’Round, and then we did the Broadway show Steel Pier, so we love working
with each other. It’s interesting how musicals come to be: sometimes someone will hand
you a script to turn into a musical, sometimes people will hand you a novel to turn into
a musical, sometimes you’ll have a vision of a girl in a yellow dress and you make that
4
into a musical. Scottsboro came about because we loved collaborating together. The slate
was open to do whatever we wanted, so long as we did it together.
We started talking about doing something true. Real. Something based on a piece of
history. Usually when you are doing a musical (at least for me) you are in a more fantastical situation—make-believe. We thought, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to do something
that was based on a true story?” So we decided to start by looking at the ten greatest
trials in American history.
Not necessarily trials associated with African American history?
No, but of course the Scottsboro Boys is one of the most famous groups of trials in our
collective history. It immediately jumped out at us. It was about nine innocent boys who
were accused of a horrific crime. It was about a dark time in our history, when so many
things happened to spawn the beginning of the civil rights movement. The case was
about the North against the South, black against white, Communists, the NAACP. It
was filled with big characters, like Samuel Leibowitz, a New York lawyer some considered to be the next Clarence Darrow. He went down to Scottsboro and thought he could
get these boys out right away, because it was clear from the evidence that they didn’t
do it. When he got down there, the prejudice that he found against a northern, Jewish
lawyer was as great as the prejudice against the nine African American boys.
As we delved more into the research, everything about it struck us: they were locked
up together and called the Scottsboro Boys as if they were a theatrical troupe. People
knew the names of all the lawyers, all the judges, the names of all the men on the jury,
but they never knew the names of the boys. They were always lumped together as the
Scottsboro Boys.
Kander and Ebb are known for writing for the underdog, writing songs like “Maybe
This Time.” They are known for writing about ordinary people in extraordinary situations, like Nazi Germany or a Latin prison, so they were attracted to this story right
away, because it is about how one lie destroyed the lives of nine young men.
How do you balance accuracy and theatricality when adapting history into a musical?
What was most important to us was making the boys individuals. We didn’t want it to be
an after-school special or a documentary, and the minute you decide to make something
theatrical, you give yourself license not to be linear.
So we focused on the individuals as real people. One of the boys, Haywood Patterson,
learned how to write while he was in jail. Eventually he wrote a book called Scottsboro
Boy, and we based a lot on his story. He is the character who comes out as the leader of
the nine. He was always put in the front, because he was said to have looked the meanest
and the strongest, and he was the most trouble.
In the end the show is about the phrase, “I matter.” You can lump these people
together, but when you pull one character out, it’s a whole different story.
5
“I matter” is a huge part of it because we remember each of them at the end of the
show. A lot of people don’t remember this part of history, and it is still relevant today.
Kander and Ebb were both young boys in the 1930s. Did they bring any of their own
memories into the creative process?
John Kander remembers it very well. He remembers being a little boy in Kansas City
and reading about the Scottsboro Boys in the paper every week. And then, all of a
sudden, they were gone. No one was talking about them anymore. He remembers that
moment: one minute they were very popular, and then they disappeared.
When was the decision made to incorporate the structure of a minstrel show into The
Scottsboro Boys?
In doing the research, we came across journalists who, several times, referred to the trials
as a minstrel show—saying the boys were paraded around as if they were in a minstrel
show. Kander and Ebb used a cabaret device for the show Cabaret and a vaudeville device
for the show Chicago. So they thought that minstrel would be a great way to bring music
into the Scottsboro story. Fred always used to say, “If we don’t make it entertaining,
nobody will listen.”
That device, which is thought of as racist, actually helped us, because we decided
to take the form and turn it on its head. Usually minstrel was white people portraying blacks in a disrespectful way, but we asked ourselves, “What if it were a group of
African Americans playing white people?” It allows these nine actors to portray two
white women, white guards, white sheriffs, white judges: it allows them to play parts
that they would not otherwise be able to play. Also, the way the show is structured . . . It
is typical for a minstrel show to have a semicircle of chairs, and as our show unfolds, the
actors take those chairs and they tell the story with them: they make them into a train,
they make them into a holding room, they make them into a cell. So the actors become
in charge of the structure: they build the set. And at the very end, they deconstruct the
minstrel form and they walk away from it. The very last thing the audience sees is a
semicircle of chairs completely tipped over.
Were you nervous about working with a form that is taboo?
It was the perfect way for the actors to tell this story. In the minstrel format, there was
always a story told (it was a silly story—a farmer’s wife and a traveling salesman, or
something), and here we are telling the story of the Scottsboro Boys. Flipped on its head,
using the device in a way to show the tragedy of it all, we thought it was a good idea.
When people see the show, they understand it and they’re with us. Admittedly, when
they hear this out of context, it doesn’t sound like a swell idea.
6
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I read about the protests of the Broadway production, and about how some of those
protesters traveled to see the Philadelphia production and, afterwards, came backstage
and apologized for protesting.
They did. The actors were overwhelmed by that. When that happened on Broadway,
because the protesters refused to see the show (we offered them tickets, of course), it was
hard to have a conversation about it—there was no way to engage them.
The Scottsboro Boys really does make people think, and when audiences leave they
have a conversation about it—unlike some musicals, after which you go to dinner and
don’t discuss it. When you leave The Scottsboro Boys, it inspires a conversation about your
own thoughts and opinions about race, your own family, your own history. When you
inspire that, as creators of theater, you feel like you’ve accomplished a great deal.
What was the first Scottsboro Boys rehearsal room like?
It was wonderful. We got together for the first reading the day after Obama was elected
president, and we were wondering if the idea of race would change in America. It was
exciting. The actors saw this piece and the way we were using the minstrel form as a
great challenge. Never once was there any consternation about race in the room. I was
waiting to see if anyone would be uncomfortable, but it never happened. If anything, the
7
cast rallied together and invested in telling that story. Because of the device, they became
storytellers. Of all the shows I’ve ever done, I’ve never been with a group of actors who
invested so much in telling a story.
Do you think that, in part, that passion stems from the fact that this story has been
forgotten?
I’m sure, because it’s been erased from history. It’s not taught. Most people aren’t aware
of how the Scottsboro Boys helped redefine the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee
of equal protection under the law for all Americans and ensured that no race or ethnic
group could be excluded from serving on a jury. Rosa Parks’s husband marched for the
Scottsboro Boys, and she writes about them, and you want to believe that when she
made that courageous decision on the bus, that her knowledge of the Scottsboro Boys
was a part of what made her say, “No, I’m not going to move this time.”
How was it different for you to choreograph for a real story as opposed to a fantastical
world?
Because I am a choreographer for the theater, I have to adhere to a decade and a geographical area for every show. So for Scottsboro Boys, I’m in the ’20s and ’30s. My choreography is interspersed with real steps that are indicative of that time period—as well as
elements that were very popular at that time, like the shadow play. The shadow play was
especially popular in the ’20s, and we have a song “Make Friends with the Truth” during
which the guys put up a sheet and do a little shadow play behind it. It’s something you
would often find in minstrel shows or in vaudeville.
Scottsboro actor James T. Lane has said that when you are choreographing, you give
not only the steps but the history of the steps. Why is it important that dancers
understand where the steps come from?
When you dance, it has to be motivated, and the more information you can give on a
dance step, the greater it will become because it will become rich—it will be danced with
subtext. For example, we do the cakewalk, which really came from the levee down south,
where African Americans would mock the white master. They would hold their hand
high and have their chest erect and lift up their knees in mocking the upper class. But it
became so popular that it became a dance step.
Your first collaboration with Kander and Ebb was on a revival of Flora, the Red
Menace, but one of your early jobs was dancing in Chicago.
Yes, I did the national tour with Gwen [Verdon] and Chita [Rivera] and Jerry Orbach.
I had known Kander and Ebb from afar, and Scott Ellis had done [Kander and Ebb’s]
The Rink, and one day we were both lamenting how we would love to do what we came
to New York to do, which was to create theater. And Scott said, “Let’s ask Kander and
8
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Ebb if we can work on Flora, the Red Menace. The worst thing that could happen is they
will say, ‘No.’”
I think that’s good advice for young people today: the worst thing that can happen is
they can say, “No,” but you should go ask the question. So we asked them, and they said,
“Yes.” So we took it down to the Vineyard Theatre and had a wonderful production. It
had a little bit of a cult following, and, in fact, it launched our careers to the other side
of the table. And we became very good friends with Kander and Ebb.
You’ve worked with them on a number of shows, and with Scottsboro’s book writer,
David Thompson.
Yes, we’re all very close. In fact, David and Kander and I are meeting to start something
new.
Will you start again by sitting around the table and asking, “What are we going to do
this time?”
Yeah. Same thing. That’s the best way!
9
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Will you look for a true story again?
We’re talking about it. We just started getting together again. We’ve come close to
choosing something, but not yet to speak about.
What were the disadvantages of starting with historical material in creating a musical?
I don’t think there were any. We always had research to fall back on. It was very fulfilling.
The whole thing. For all of us, of all the shows we’ve ever done, this is the show that is
most dear to us.
How did Ebb’s death in 2004 influence The Scottsboro Boys?
When Fred died, it was put on the shelf. I didn’t know that we would go back to it. Then
about three years ago, Kander said, “Let’s look at this again.” And I said, “Of course,” and
we realized how much had already been done. Kander finished the rest of the lyrics and
the music, what needed to be done. We thought, “What would Freddy do here? What
would Freddy say?” Kander said he would channel Freddy when he was at the piano. So
he was always with us. We would talk about him at every rehearsal and reading. We miss
him. He would be so pleased: we were always chasing him, because he was so excited
about The Scottsboro Boys.
10
Entertainment with an Edge
Kander and Ebb and the American Musical
By Amy Krivohlavek
If they were characters in a musical, John Kander and Fred Ebb wouldn’t seem destined
for friendship, much less a decades-long musical partnership. But when Ebb, the intense
lyricist from New York, and Kander, the warm-hearted composer from the Midwest,
were introduced in 1962 by their mutual music publisher, creative lightning struck. By
the time Ebb died in 2004, the duo that Kander himself dubbed “Kandernebb” had
become the longest-running composer-and-lyricist collaboration in musical theater
history, and one of the most prolific. Working together in a small room in Ebb’s New
York apartment, they wrote more than 2,000 songs, featured in 20 musicals—13 of which
appeared on Broadway—as well as in film scores, concerts, and other special events.
Cabaret and Chicago, their best-known and most-celebrated works, have enjoyed countless productions worldwide, with Chicago now the longest-running revival in Broadway
history. The iconic standards “New York, New York,” “Cabaret,” and “All That Jazz” have
become enduring hits of the American songbook. The recipients of numerous honors,
including three Tony Awards for their songwriting (for Cabaret, Woman of the Year, and
Kiss of the Spider Woman), Kander and Ebb were also honored with the Kennedy Center
Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Performing Arts.
Overture: A Fortuitous Introduction
John Kander was born on March 18, 1927, in Kansas City, Missouri, into a music-loving
family who actively nurtured his interest in the arts. He discovered the joys of playing
the family piano around the age of four and began taking lessons when he was six. He
remembers the thrill of making music for the first time when his Aunt Rheta put her
hands over his on the keys: “That made a chord, and as a boy, it was about the most
thrilling thing that ever happened to me.” He began composing in the second grade during an arithmetic class. Unable to answer a question posed by the teacher, he explained,
“I’m writing a Christmas carol.” She didn’t believe him, so she crossed to his desk to
discover big notes scrawled across the pages of his notebook. The school sang the song
at the school assembly that Christmas—after the teacher sought approval from Kander’s
( Jewish) family. After several stints in the military, Kander studied music composition,
earning his undergraduate degree at Oberlin Conservatory of Music, then completed a
11
master’s degree at Columbia University. The head of the Columbia music department,
Douglas Moore, confided to Kander that if he had to do it all over again, he would write
for Broadway. “That was sort of my blessing,” says Kander. “From then on, I directed
myself that way.” A chance encounter with the piano player of the Broadway production
of West Side Story led him to substitute as a pit pianist, where he met choreographer
Jerome Robbins, who brought him in to accompany auditions and write dance music.
Born in New York City on April 18, 1928—allegedly, as he was notoriously secretive about the actual year of his birth—Fred Ebb grew up in a more austere household.
His parents never took him to the theater or to concerts, and he first discovered musicals through cast recordings. He graduated early from high school, earning rapid-fire
degrees (a bachelor’s from New York University and a master’s in English literature
from Columbia University) by the time he was 18. He became interested in writing as
an undergraduate, but worked a variety of odd-jobs before he began selling song lyrics to
record companies at the urging of friends. Following graduation, he worked with Philip
Springer (“Santa Baby”), who taught him the nuts and bolts of songwriting. In the early
1950s he collaborated with composer Paul Klein, and the pair generated three full-length
musicals and a few popular hit songs. Eventually, Klein left show business, freeing Ebb
up for his meeting with Kander.
Both Kander and Ebb worked briefly with other collaborators before they were
introduced; after they met, they declined almost every outside request to collaborate. As
they looked for early inspiration, their music publisher, Tommy Valando, introduced the
duo to visionary director/producer Hal Prince, who was working on a play called Take
Her, She’s Mine. They wrote a song for the show. Prince didn’t end up using it, but “it was
the beginning,” Ebb remembered. “The ease with which the song came, the fun it was to
write it, and the pleasure we both took in it, despite the fact that it didn’t go anywhere,
were the clues.” Kander agreed: “Some of the shows have been hits and some of the
shows have been flops. . . . But the one thing that’s consistent is that we’ve always had a
good time writing. Everything else connected with this business can be horrifying, but
the one thing that has always been a pleasure to us is just the sheer process of writing.”
And the process often didn’t take long. To show off how fast they could work, Kander
and Ebb famously created a song between dessert and coffee during a dinner party at
Ebb’s apartment. Kander said, “Play a waltz,” and within 15 minutes they had “I Don’t
Care Much,” a simple, haunting ballad that they put into their trunk—then pulled out
ten years later for Cabaret.
Entr’acte: Form Takes Flight
Kander and Ebb grew up in the age of Rodgers and Hammerstein, the very heyday of
the Golden Era musical, when a post–World War ii optimism inflected the spirit of
Broadway and songs from musicals defined American popular music. When Kander and
Ebb began writing in the early 1960s, however, the Broadway musical was in decline, as
audiences’ attention was diverted by the Cold War and Vietnam—and the rise of rock
12
’n’ roll. The musical had become more serious,
which fit Kander and Ebb’s aesthetic as they
began to experiment with new forms. As James
Leve writes in the recent Kander and Ebb volume of the Yale Broadway Masters series: “Their
success was due to an ability to assimilate the
past into something new. While moving away
from linear narratives toward more fragmented
structures, they also reached back to old song
styles and theatrical venues. This approach
helped to transform the musical into a more
commentative, self-reflexive, and ironic genre,
and one that resonated with modern audiences.”
The first musical they wrote together, Golden
Gate, took place in San Francisco in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake as the city was
being rebuilt. Styled in the manner of a more +),+/!.ƫ +$*ƫ * !.ƫ Ĩ/0* %*#ĩƫ * ƫ
traditional 1950s musical, the show didn’t take (5.%%/0ƫ .! ƫ ƫ Ĩ,$+0+ƫ +1.0!/5ƫ +"ƫ $!ƫ
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off, but they used it as their audition piece for
director George Abbott when he was looking
for a songwriting team for Flora, the Red Menace, which became Kander and Ebb’s first
Broadway show in 1965. It also marked their first collaboration with an up-and-coming
performer named Liza Minnelli, who, at 17, struggled to win the title role, then won a
Tony Award for her performance. Although Flora received mixed reviews, it cemented
a relationship among Minnelli, Kander, and Ebb that would endure for the duration of
their careers. The team wrote material for Minnelli’s solo variety acts, and Ebb remembered an engagement at the Shoreham Hotel as the first standing ovation he ever saw.
When people immediately stood up following her routine, “Liza thought they were leaving, and so did I,” said Ebb. “She sat down on the stage, she got so scared of it all. That
was our first experience, and from then on we just kept writing, and she got more and
more successful.” Minnelli would go on to star in the screen adaptation of Cabaret, for
which she won an Oscar, and continued to appear in many of their other musicals and
perform original solo material, including the famous television concert Liza with a “Z.”
After Flora opened, Prince pushed the team toward a new project. Cabaret, a dark,
risqué piece set in Berlin during the Nazis’ rise to power, became Kander and Ebb’s
breakthrough show as it redefined musical theater into a new form for the postmodern
era: the “concept” musical. Moving beyond linear storytelling, this new genre was more
self-referential and presentational, with all elements of the production tied to a central
theme or metaphor. As Ebb remembered, during the Broadway previews of Cabaret,
audiences fled the theater at intermission; after the rapturous reviews, the show played
to sold-out houses.
13
According to Leve, Kander and Ebb were “provocateurs and arguably the most subversive practitioners of the concept musical.” Like Bertolt Brecht, they drew attention to
the disconnect between song and story, but gave it their own spin:
Kander and Ebb developed their own sense of irony by exploring serious topics within various forms of popular entertainment: for example, a decadent
cabaret embodies German society during Hitler’s rise to power [Cabaret]; the
Hollywood musical provides a wrongly imprisoned homosexual an escape from
an oppressive society [Kiss of the Spider Woman]; vaudeville is a metaphor for a
legal system that rewards the most dazzling courtroom performances [Chicago];
a dance marathon represents possibilities for a better life [Steel Pier]; and a
minstrel show reveals the ingrained racism of the American criminal justice
system [The Scottsboro Boys].
In this way, Kander and Ebb created musicals that mirrored and celebrated popular culture, using bold, broad entertainment styles to illuminate darker, more serious issues that
resonated profoundly with contemporary audiences. “Good storytelling, even about tough
subjects, should always be entertaining,” says Kander. “And I don’t think there’s anything
wrong with giving people something to think about while you’re entertaining them.”
As it produced both successes and flops, Kander and Ebb’s career spanned revolutionary changes in the musical—and American history. On the landscape of musical
theater, they watched the arrival of the rock musical, the British invasion of Andrew
Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, the rise of the mega musical, and the debut of Disney on
Broadway. Offstage, they witnessed the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the Stonewall
Riots, the Vietnam War, the push toward women’s rights, the Cold War, and the 9/11
terrorist attacks and the wars that followed them. Deftly capturing political and cultural
events, their musicals are among the most socially aware of the genre—using song and
dance not just to entertain but to ignite a consciousness.
Finale: The Scottsboro Boys
Following Ebb’s death from a heart attack in 2004, Kander was bereft. Nonetheless, he
continued working, determined to bring the projects they had already begun to the stage.
One of them, Curtains, a detective comedy play-within-a-play about murder and musicals, hit Broadway in 2007. The Scottsboro Boys (originally titled Minstrel Show) arrived in
2010. Scottsboro had its genesis around Ebb’s kitchen table back in 2002, as they searched
for inspiration with two of their favorite collaborators, with whom they had worked on
Steel Pier—director/choreographer Susan Stroman, who also choreographed a successful
off-Broadway revival of Flora, the Red Menace in 1987, and bookwriter David Thompson.
While sifting through famous court cases of the 20th century, they were immediately
drawn to the controversial story of the Scottsboro Boys. In 1930s Alabama, nine young
African American men were accused of raping two white women on a train. The trial—
and subsequent appeals and retrials—spanned decades, destroying the lives of the young
men as the American legal system repeatedly failed to deliver them justice.
14
Musical Numbers in The Scottsboro Boys
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As Thompson remembers, Ebb immediately jumped at the project:
He couldn’t work fast enough on this one. He was way ahead of me when we
were writing, which was not typical of Fred. . . . He knew immediately. This
was the embodiment of that notion, which is, we are going to entertain you,
and you are going to have fun, but at the same time we’re going to lead you to
a place that is very dangerous and controversial, and what you take out of this,
where you get, you’re going to have to sort out yourself, but in the meantime
we’re going to entertain you.
Their only show based on an actual historic event, The Scottsboro Boys, according to Leve,
became Kander and Ebb’s “most direct assault on racial prejudice in America and their
most unsettling work.” The material also inspired the team to delve into yet another
historic—and taboo—theatrical form, as the segmented structure of the minstrel show
proved ideal for telling the dynamic, wide-ranging story of the Scottsboro Boys. Several
previous Broadway musicals had evoked the minstrel show, but simply to perpetuate
racist attitudes; in The Scottsboro Boys, it works subversively to advance the central theme.
Thompson explains that in their original form, minstrel shows “made fun of all sorts
of social forms, whether it was the upper class, [political] parties, things that were fashionable, elegant, the white man, the understanding of certain things.” Race, class, gender,
and politics became ammunition with which to entertain and create a sense of superior-
15
ity over the audience. Minstrel shows are, of course, infamous for having been extremely
pejorative in their depiction of African Americans. For Kander and Ebb, this made the
minstrel show a powerful subversive structure through which to tell the complex story
of the Scottsboro Boys, once again balancing broad entertainment with an undercurrent of tragedy and despair—and transforming an outdated form into something fresh,
provocative, and surprisingly modern.
In many ways, Scottsboro brings the Kander and Ebb canon full circle, bringing in
familiar elements from many of their musicals and fusing them together to tell the story:
the press, the justice system, prostitution, racial politics, and gender. About the challenge
of creating Scottsboro, Kander says:
The trick here has been: How do you write a musical where the audience will
respond to the story even though it’s about some very ugly things? I never write
a piece thinking that I have to do X because the audience will like X. That’s
paralyzing. But we are entertainers, all of us, and finding great entertainment
in a story like this one has been a test, a thrilling one. There’s a kind of racism
in America today that is so insidious, the way enemies of our black president
use code language to depict him as the “other,” and that part of our world has
a direct through-line back to the Scottsboro Boys. The minstrel show elements
are, I like to think, part of the entertainment, but in a way that makes you think
about how we tell stories, tell our history as Americans.
Kander and Ebb’s chief weapon for defending individuals throughout history has
been the song. Their most famous compositions, often created for the iconic divas who
debuted them—from Minelli and Chita Rivera to Lauren Bacall and Barbra Streisand—
have been described as “hyperbolic anthems of survival.” Ebb loved to perform them,
and Kander called them “screamers.” They represent perhaps the best example of the
duo’s seemingly mismatched—yet somehow divinely paired—talents: Ebb’s acerbic lyrics climb relentlessly onward, buoyed by Kander’s hopeful vamps and gorgeous melodies.
Whether giving voice to a fading cabaret singer, a condemned murderess, or a wrongly
accused black teenager, Kander and Ebb give their characters a will to survive that continues beyond the final note.
According to Minelli, one of their greatest interpreters, “You look at the work, and
the work speaks for itself. Their songs say what we’re really thinking and they expose
what lies behind the façade and behind the secrets, behind the bluster and behind
everything that society teaches you to be. They challenge and inspire you to stand up
for yourself.”
SOURCESƫ '/+*ƫ ċƫ .5!.ƫ * ƫ %$. ƫ ċƫ 2%/+*Čƫ ! /ċČ The Art of the American Musical:
Conversations with the Creators Ĩ!3ƫ.1*/3%'Čƫ
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ė('"!ƫ * ƫ %#+0.5Čƫ %*!(5ƫ 1*! ČĘƫ The New York Timesƫ Ĩ0+!.ƫ āĂČƫ ĂĀāĀĩĎƫ +$*ƫ * !.ƫ * ƫ
.! ƫƫĨ/ƫ0+( ƫ0+ƫ.!#ƫ3.!*!ĩČƫColored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Show Biz,
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16
The Scottsboro Boys
A True Story
By Dan Rubin
On a Train to Memphis
On March 25, 1931, a number of youths—all poor and uneducated southerners—were
bumming a ride on the 44-car Alabama Great Southern chugging its way through
northern Alabama on its way to Memphis, Tennessee. One of the travelers, a white boy,
stepped on the hand of the black Haywood Patterson as he held onto the side of a car.
Heated words were exchanged. When the freight train slowed to climb a hill, the white
boy and his pals jumped off to gather rocks, with which they began pelting Patterson
and his friends (Eugene Williams and brothers Andrew and Leroy Wright). Patterson’s
group, with the help of other black hoboes they recruited, pushed or otherwise encouraged the white boys from the train, ending the dispute.
Only that was not the end. It was the first bout in a battle that would go on for
decades and expose Alabama’s social inequality and broken judicial system to the world.
The Scottsboro case began “with a white foot on my black hand,” Patterson later wrote,
eloquently encapsulating the plight of black Americans living in the South at the time—
a tragedy that, for many, the Scottsboro Boys came to represent.
The defeated white gang ran to the nearby town of Steveson and complained to the
stationmaster. The stationmaster got word to the authorities in Paint Rock, and by the
time the train pulled into town, a well-armed posse was waiting to stop it. Patterson,
Williams, and the Wright brothers were pulled off, as were five other black boys:
Clarence Norris and Charlie Weems, who had been involved with the earlier scuffle; and
Olen Montgomery, Willie Roberson, and Ozie Powell, who had been traveling alone in
other train cars, oblivious to the confrontation. Mostly strangers, they were bound with
plow line, shoved onto the flatbed of a truck, and transported to Scottsboro’s dilapidated, two-story jail. The outspoken Patterson asked what they were being arrested for.
“Assault and attempt to murder,” he was told.
Which is likely what the boys would have been charged with had the authorities
not also found two white girls traveling on the train. Victoria Price and Ruby Bates,
two mill workers from Huntsville, Alabama, were traveling home after unsuccessfully
looking for work in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Like the boys, they were impoverished,
17
uneducated, and desperate—“white trash” despised by “respectable” southerners almost
as much as the destitute black population. Both girls were the primary providers for their
fatherless homes, and, with work in the poorly paying mill sporadic, they supplemented
their incomes with sex work. Both had had run-ins with the law before, so when they
were taken from the train in Paint Rock, they knew enough to be nervous. They would
be charged with vagrancy, or worse, under the Mann Act, with crossing state lines for
immoral purposes.
So, in the interest of self-preservation, they lied. As the train traveled from Steveson
to Paint Rock, they told the officers, 12 black men had held them down and their legs
apart, threatened them with knives and a pistol, and taken turns raping them. Three had
gotten away, but the authorities were currently holding nine in custody. The distraction
worked, and for the first time in their lives, the girls were not looked at as untouchable,
low-down tramps: instead they were transformed into poor but virtuous white southern
women, whose honor had been sullied and must be avenged.
Had the boys feared for their lives before, after learning what the two girls were
accusing them of, they knew they were as good as dead. Word of their most deplorable crime spread instantly. Their brutality was no surprise to the members of the rural
white population, who believed that black men would always rape white women when
given the chance—and that the only way to combat such savagery was to strike the fear
of mutilation and death into their hearts. A lynch mob surrounding the Scottsboro jail
grew. By evening, a mass of 300 threatened to break down the doors; inside, the deputies
were ready to turn their prisoners over. Soon the boys would be a statistic—nine more
lynchings to add to the South’s ugly ledger. And the world would think little of it.
The Jackson County sheriff, M. L. Wann, however, would not let that happen. “I
don’t believe that story the girls told,” he comforted the nine boys, as his wife, within
earshot, attempted to persuade Price and Bates to recant. Wann tried to disperse the
crowd. Failing, he called the governor. The governor called the National Guard. The
boys survived the night, and the following day they were escorted to a prison in Gadsen.
Their arrest made headlines in the morning paper, and they were rechristened: for the
moment they were safe, but for the rest of their lives—however long that might be—
they would be known as the Scottsboro Boys.
The Trial
The Scottsboro Boys had not been lynched by the mob, but the danger, while less
immediate, was no less real. On the morning of March 26, 1931, newspapers circulated
bearing such headlines as “Threw White Boys from Freight Train and Held White Girls
Prisoners until Captured by Posse” and “Nine Negro Men Rape Two White Girls.” In
the incendiary articles that followed, Price and Bates were described as “girls,” even
though Price, at 21, was older than any of the “Negro Men” she had accused: Weems, the
oldest, and Andrew “Andy” Wright were 19; Norris and Patterson were 18; Montgomery
and Roberson were 17, the same age as Bates; Powell was 15; Williams and Leroy “Roy”
18
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Wright, the youngest, were only 13. With no one to contradict the lurid details printed
by the media—locked away, the Boys certainly could not—most people believed the
grotesque fiction.
Judge A. E. Hawkins scheduled the trial to begin on April 6. It was First Monday,
or horse-swapping day—a day when farmers from Scottsboro’s neighboring counties
would come into town with their families to trade and socialize. The coalescence of this
monthly tradition with the well-publicized case attracted thousands by the 8:30 a.m.
start of the trial. By 10 a.m., the small village was overflowing with 10,000 spectators.
They were there for a lynching: if not a gruesome one, at least a legal one. Armed soldiers had to set up a perimeter around the square outside the courthouse and stationed
extra guards inside. Everyone was searched before entering.
The Boys had been held in Gadsen without bail for almost two weeks, unable to
communicate with their parents or a lawyer. In the courtroom, they met their representation for the first time. Mr. Steven Roddy had been hired by a group of black preachers
in Chattanooga, who had raised $50 for the cause. He introduced himself to the Boys
and, with liquor on his breath, told the guilty ones to confess so the innocent ones
could have a chance at survival. When Roddy appeared before the judge, however, he
19
balked. He requested that he be allowed to perform in an advisory role to whomever the
judge appointed from the Scottsboro bar. The 69-year-old Milo Moody—“an ancient
Scottsboro lawyer of low type and rare practice”—accepted the responsibility of the
defendants’ fates. And, without time for the defense to prepare, the first of four trials
began.
The vivid testimony of the unabashed Price would have been enough to send the
Scottsboro Boys to the electric chair. (Raping a white woman was a capital offense in
Alabama.) A masterful storyteller with histrionic flare, Price retold the fabrication she
had fine-tuned for the newspapers over the last 12 days. She painted a violent scene of
black brutes driven not just by lust but also by the need to possess white women. This hit
the rawest nerve in the minds of the jurors—12 white, rural, southern men.
The incompetency and half-heartedness of the Roddy/Moody team did not help
matters, nor did Judge Hawkins’s belief that the Boys were guilty and that the trial was
a waste of time. But it was the testimonies of Norris, Patterson, and Roy Wright that
encouraged one Scottsboro editor to say that the case against the Boys was “so conclusive
as to be almost perfect.” The night before the first trial, Norris was taken from his cell,
threatened, and beaten. On the stand the following day, he swore, “I did not have my
hands on the girls at all, but I saw that one rape her,” pointing indiscriminately at one
of the other Boys. “They all raped her, every one of them.”
The first trial ended in a guilty verdict for Norris and Weems—the sentence, death.
The spectators inside the courtroom cheered and the crowd outside exploded into
thunderous celebration. A brass band played “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town
Tonight” and “Dixie.”
The next day, a hopeless Patterson, tried alone, attempted to save himself and his
three friends by pointing the finger at the other five. During Patterson’s trial, Roy
Wright—who had been jabbed in the cheek by a militiaman’s bayonet on the night of
their arrest and, during the trial, had been taken into a back room of the courthouse,
where he was whipped and threatened by a deputy sheriff and his cronies—confirmed
Patterson’s accusation. But then the terrified 13-year-old went on to echo Norris’s desperation: “I saw all of them have intercourse; I saw that with my own eyes!” Patterson
was found guilty and sentenced to death. The next day Montgomery, Powell, Roberson,
Williams, and Andy Wright, prosecuted as a group, were found guilty and sentenced
to death.
The final trial, of Roy Wright, was declared a mistrial. The jury found the boy guilty,
but, because of his youth, the prosecution had only asked for life imprisonment. Eleven
jurors held out for the electric chair.
Back in Gadsen’s jail, the condemned rioted. They cursed the guards, demanded pork
chops, and tried to escape. The guards handcuffed them together and beat them nearly
to death. They were all transferred to Jefferson County Jail in Birmingham. Roy Wright
stayed there to await his retrial; the remaining eight were taken to Montgomery’s Kilby
Prison and put on death row to await their execution, scheduled for July 10, the earliest
possible date permitted by law.
20
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The Legal Battle That Changed the South
On July 10, Kilby prison officials told the eight boys, “You’re going to die tonight.” They
brought in eight caskets for their bodies and prepared the electric chair. At midnight,
they led a man from his cell. He shook the hands of his fellow prisoners on his way to
the room with the green door at the end of the hall. Minutes later an electric current
buzzed through the cell block. Willie Stokes was dead.
Stokes was not a Scottsboro Boy: he was a convicted murderer, and the first of many
who would pass through that green door while the Boys were held in Kilby. Despite
what the guards would have the Boys believe, their executions had been stayed due to
appeals filed by the International Labor Defense—a legal institution associated with
the Communist Party. The ILD had been watching the Scottsboro case from the very
beginning, and they were convinced that the Boys had been railroaded, innocent of any
crime other than being poor and black. The day after sentencing, the ILD voted to take
on the appeal. Their members were the first kind faces the prisoners saw in Kilby, and
21
they visited and comforted the Boys’ frightened parents. So when the initially hesitant
NAACP finally sent stewards to take over the Boys’ defense, they were turned away.
The NAACP, had its help been accepted, would have quietly worked within the system to try to save the Boys. The ILD, on the other hand, made noise. It wrote and circulated inflammatory articles about the backwards, KKK-dominated court in Scottsboro.
It hosted and encouraged protests. Letters, telegrams, and petitions flooded the offices
of local and state authorities, arriving from every state in the union and from all over the
world. By 1933, Governor Miller alone had received 50,000 telegrams. Supporters sent
the prisoners mail, gifts, and money, and the Boys were especially hated and tortured by
the Kilby guards because of their fame.
After a year and a half, the ILD won Powell v. Alabama, in which the United States
Supreme Court overturned the Scottsboro convictions on the grounds that the defendants had been denied adequate counsel, violating their Fourteenth Amendment rights.
To lead the defense during the 1933 retrial, the ILD hired famed New York lawyer
Samuel Leibowitz, who was able to move the proceedings into the Decatur courtroom
of Judge James Horton.
Unlike Judge Hawkins, Judge Horton had a reputation for fairness, and the dramatic
retrial of Haywood Patterson exposed all of the holes in Victoria Price’s accusation.
Leibowitz attacked Price’s character by bringing in evidence of her past indiscretions.
Ruby Bates, who had disappeared in the weeks leading up to the trial, made a surprise
appearance for the defense—and admitted it had all been a lie. As important was the
testimony of Dr. R. R. Bridges, who had attended to the girls hours after they were supposedly assaulted and had found no fresh injuries or semen.
The all-white, all-male jury found Patterson guilty. For a second time, he was sentenced to death. The ILD and Leibowitz had underestimated southerners’ distrust of
northern interference—not to mention their anti-Semitism and hatred of Communists,
which rivaled their racial bigotry. Throughout the trial, Leibowitz received death threats.
During summation, the prosecution exploited this antagonism, highlighting the “sinister
influences” of New York and claiming the testimony of Bates had been “bought and sold
with Jew money.” The prosecutors asked the jury to base its decision on the testimony of
Price alone, which is exactly what it did.
In a move that would cost him his job, Judge Horton set aside the verdict. “The
testimony of the prosecutrix [Price] in this case is not only uncorroborated, but it also
bears on its face indications of improbability and is contradicted by other evidence.” He
ordered a new trial.
Over the next four years, Leibowitz fought for the Boys. He fought retrials before
a hostile Judge Callahan and lost. He fought appeals before the U.S. Supreme Court
and won: Norris v. Alabama found that black citizens had been intentionally kept off
Alabama’s jury rolls. During that time, all nine Boys were victims of the state’s penal
system. They were abused by guards and each other. Leaving Patterson’s fourth trial in
1936, Ozie Powell attacked a deputy with a pen knife and was shot in the head. (He
survived.) But harder than the violence was the time spent locked in small, dark cells.
22
The Boys who didn’t know how to read and write when they were arrested learned, and
they passed their days singing, gambling, fighting, praying, and writing letters mourning
the loss of their youth—but, mostly, just waiting.
By 1937, Leibowitz was exhausted; the state of Alabama was exhausted, too, fed up
with what the trials and appeals were costing its image and coffers. In secret New York
meetings, a compromise was arranged: Eugene Williams and Roy Wright could go free;
they had been only 13 years old at the time of their arrest. The state was also willing to
release Olen Montgomery and Willie Roberson, whose guilt it had long doubted. The
rest would get reduced sentences, but would remain in jail.
Obscurity
In 1938, outgoing Alabama Governor Bibb Graves intended to pardon the remaining
Scottsboro Boys, but when they refused to admit their guilt, he changed his mind. After
that, most of the country lost track of the Boys. In the midst of World War ii, few
noticed when Charlie Weems, Clarence Norris, Andy Wright, and Ozie Powell were
paroled. Few cared as they all struggled to adapt to life on the outside, forever burdened
with their Scottsboro Boy identities. No one knows what became of many of them.
Detached from the cases that had made them a cause, they became invisible.
But there were moments when the Scottsboro Boys reentered the news. In 1948,
Haywood Patterson escaped from Kilby and fled to Detroit; he was caught by the FBI,
but Michigan’s governor refused to extradite him to Alabama. He published his autobiography, Scottsboro Boy, before dying of cancer in 1952 while imprisoned in a Michigan
penitentiary, where he had been sent for killing a man in a bar fight.
Roy Wright, who seemed to adjust to freedom better than the rest, entered vocational
school, served in the army, married, and took a job with the merchant marine. But in
1959, he became convinced that his wife had been unfaithful while he was away at sea:
he killed her, and then himself.
Norris, who had violated his parole by fleeing north and assuming his brother’s
identity in 1946, enlisted the help of the NAACP to clear his name. It launched a successful public relations campaign, and on October 25, 1976, Norris was officially declared
not guilty for the rape of Victoria Price and Ruby Bates. Norris published The Last of
the Scottsboro Boys: An Autobiography in 1979, at which time he believed he was the only
Scottsboro Boy still alive.
“The lesson to black people, to my children, to everybody,” Norris said after his pardon, “is that you should always fight for your rights, even if it cost you your life. Stand
up for your rights, even if it kills you. That’s all that life consists of.” The last of the
Scottsboro Boys died in 1989.
23
Scottsboro in Context
By Emily Hoffman
I am just like a rabbit in a strange wood and the dogs is after him and no place
to hide.
—Scottsboro Boy Andrew Wright
Scottsboro, Alabama, 1931
I knew if a white woman accused a black man of rape, he was as good as dead.
—Scottsboro Boy Clarence Norris
Perhaps the biggest shock of the Scottsboro trials is that they happened at all. Alabama
governors were not given to ensuring the safety of black defendants awaiting trial; the
nine black boys falsely accused of raping two white women might easily have faced summary execution at the hands of the lynch mob gathered outside the Scottsboro jail on
March 25, 1931, had Governor Benjamin Meek Miller not broken precedent and called
in the National Guard.
Though lynching as a punishment had existed since the American Revolution, it
wasn’t until after the Civil War that the practice began to be used systematically to
brutalize and intimidate black Americans. Before emancipation, when blacks were still
considered property, most victims of lynchings were white abolitionists; after the war
and the social upheaval of Reconstruction, lynching became the centerpiece of a campaign of terror waged by white citizens, with the implicit sanction of legislators and the
court, against freed black men and women.
Lynch mobs were composed primarily of working-class and poor whites. Since the
early days of the Republic, the white elite had encouraged racial hatred and competition
among poor whites and blacks to break any burgeoning lower-class solidarity; multiracial uprisings like Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676 had made them nervous. By the turn of the
20th century, the “racial bribe”—wherein “the planter class extended special privileges
to poor whites in an effort to drive a wedge between them and black slaves,” according
to Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow—had succeeded and race prejudice
trumped any economic commonality, especially among the poorest whites, the so-called
24
“lowest of the low,” who clung fast to the racial superiority that proved they were always
one step up from the bottom-most rung on the ladder.
The social upheaval of Reconstruction inflamed poor whites who bitterly resented
and feared economic competition from former slaves. The number of lynchings that
took place in the years immediately following this period is uncertain, but statistics kept
at the time by the NAACP, the Chicago Tribune, and Tuskegee University suggest that
between 1880 and 1930 at least 3,000 African Americans faced death at the hands of
lynch mobs. On many occasions the killings were mass, carnival-like events, “spectacle
lynchings,” with hundreds and even thousands of white families in attendance, and body
parts of the victims divvied up among the crowd as souvenirs. In 1899, the Springfield
Republican reported on the dismemberment of Sam Hose, a man burned to death in
front of a crowd of 2,000 in Newman, Georgia: “Before the torch was applied to the
pyre, the Negro was deprived of his ears, fingers, and genital parts of his body. . . . Before
the body was cool, it was cut to pieces, the bones were crushed into small bits, and even
the tree upon which the wretch met his fate was torn up and disposed of as ‘souvenirs.’
The Negro’s heart was cut into several pieces, as was also his liver.”
Hose had been jailed for killing (almost certainly in self-defense) his white employer,
Alfred Cranford. To the murder charge, however, was added an additional accusation:
the rape of Cranford’s wife. According to the famous anti-lynch crusader Ida B. Wells,
the rape charge was trumped up to ensure the furor of the mob. “Samuel Hose was
burned to teach the Negroes that no matter what a white man does to them, they must
not resist,” Wells wrote in an 1899 pamphlet. “Hose, a servant, had killed Cranford, his
employer. An example must be made. Ordinary punishment was deemed inadequate.
This Negro must be burned alive. To make the burning a certainty the charge of outrage
was invented, and added to the charge of murder.”
Hose’s was not the only case in which “outrage” was falsely invoked. “Of the 12 men
lynched during that reign of unspeakable barbarism,” Wells continued, speaking of her
six weeks in Georgia in 1899, “only one was even charged with an assault upon a woman.
Yet southern apologists justify their savagery on the ground that Negroes are lynched
only because of their crimes against women.” Here Wells refers to the insidious myth
invented by white southerners to justify—to themselves and to others—their own brutality: the myth of the black rapist.
The myth was a political invention, emerging at a particular historically expeditious
moment. As Frederick Douglass argued in his 1894 speech “The Lessons of the Hour,”
no such claim had existed during (or before) the Civil War:
All through the late war, while the slave masters of the South were absent from
their homes in the field of rebellion, with bullets in their pockets, treason in
their hearts, broad blades in their blood stained hands, seeking the life of the
nation, with the vile purpose of perpetuating the enslavement of the Negro,
their wives, their daughters, their sisters, and their mothers were left in the
absolute custody of these same Negroes, and during all those long four years of
25
terrible conflict, when the Negro had every opportunity to commit the abominable crime now alleged against him, there was never a single instance of such
crime reported or charged against him.
The power of the myth cannot be overstated. “It has cooled our friends,” wrote Douglass,
“It has heated our enemies . . . for nearly all have in some measure accepted the charge as
true. Its perpetual reiteration in our newspapers and magazines has led men and women
to regard us with averted eyes, increasing hate, and dark suspicion.”
James Weldon Johnson, a leader of the NAACP, in his 1921 “Memorandum. Re:
Relations between the Crimes of Rape and Lynching,” explained that “there have been
many lynchings where the victim was not even accused of rape but in which cases the
lynchers gave rape as a cause.” A case in point is the lynching of Elijah Strickland, a
black preacher whom Hose was said to have mentioned as an accomplice in his killing of
Cranford. Strickland, after refusing to admit to something he had not done, was found
hanging from a persimmon tree with a blood-stained piece of paper pinned to his chest
on which was written, “We must protect our Ladies.”
(The terrible irony is that the myth mirrored and masked the truth of racialized
sexual violence in the South, where white men continued to rape black women with
impunity, as they had done systematically during the era of slavery.)
It is not incidental, then, that when Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, two poor white
women from the mill town of Huntsville, Alabama, were caught hoboing on the same
freight train as nine black boys, they chose to claim the boys had raped them in order to
avoid punishment. The girls were impoverished prostitutes who were known to consort
with black men—in other words, “the lowest of the low,” as Hollace Ransdall noted in
the 1931 ACLU report on the Scottsboro case. They played the strongest card they had;
they must have known how readily they would be believed.
When Governor Miller called in the National Guard to protect the Scottsboro Boys,
it was little more than a bit of southern decorum. By 1931, lynching had already begun
slowly to decline, in part due to the waning of the Ku Klux Klan’s power in the mid1920s, and in part due to the work of anti-lynching activists like Wells and the NAACP,
who had brought the gruesome practice under national scrutiny. Those who favored
gentility—Miller, the Jackson County sherriff, and local newspapers—simply wished to
honor the forms of justice; few doubted that the Boys were guilty, and that the rape of
a white woman by a black man ought to be punished by death. James Goodman, author
of Stories of Scottsboro, cites characteristic news coverage: “If ever there was an excuse for
taking the law into their own hands,” the editor of the Scottsboro Progressive Age wrote,
“surely this was one.” Nevertheless, he continued, the people of Jackson County “have
saved the good name of the county and state by remaining cool and allowing the law to
take its course.”
The understanding, of course, was that in return for delivering the “brutes” (as the
Huntsville Times referred to them) to the court, the court would reward the people of
26
the county with a swift conviction and sentence of death. The all-white jury did not
disappoint.
The Legacy of Scottsboro
To all who helped in the courts, wrote letters, sent money, picketed and
marched and died for us boys. They helped me, helped the country, helped my
people. I guess my people gained more off the Scottsboro case than any of us
boys did. It led to putting Negroes on juries in the South. It made the whole
country, in fact the whole world, talk about how the Negro people have to live
in the South. Maybe that was the biggest thing of all. Our case opened up a lot
of politics in the country. People said more about lynching, the poll tax, and a
black man’s rights from then on.
—Scottsboro Boy Haywood Patterson
Scottsboro changed things. From a strictly legal perspective, two landmark U.S.
Supreme Court decisions were made during the seven years of trials and appeals. In
the first, Powell v. Alabama (1932), which overturned the first round of convictions, the
court ruled that the woeful inadequacy of the Boys’ appointed counsel constituted a
denial of due process. The trial judge at Scottsboro had appointed all seven members
of the Scottsboro bar to the defense, a decision which was tantamount, Justice George
Sutherland wrote in the majority opinion, to appointing no counsel at all, since none of
the seven felt any particular obligation:
The defendants, young, ignorant, illiterate, surrounded by hostile sentiment,
hauled back and forth under guard of soldiers, charged with an atrocious crime,
regarded with especial horror in the community where they were to be tried,
were thus put in peril of their lives within a few moments after counsel for the
first time charged with any degree of responsibility began to represent them.
While the Supreme Court’s decision left the fate of the Scottsboro Boys uncertain—
their guilt or innocence played not at all into the decision—it was one of the first strong
applications of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Until then, the
courts had “used the conveniently vague words of the amendment to protect property
rights and ward off the regulation of economic enterprise,” writes Goodman. In this
case, Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote in an essay for the New York Times, the words of
the amendment “return to their more immediate purpose of protecting black men from
oppressive and unequal treatment by whites.” Though the right to counsel ruling in
Powell v. Alabama applied only to capital cases, it laid the groundwork for a series of
subsequent decisions that expanded the right to counsel to all those who could receive
jail time if convicted: a major piece of justice for the American poor.
In the second major decision, Norris v. Alabama (1935), Samuel Leibowitz, the Boys’
lawyer starting in 1933, effectively demonstrated that African Americans had been
27
systematically excluded from the jury rolls in Alabama. This, the court ruled, violated
the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the unanimous opinion, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote that the “violent presumption . . . that
the uniform exclusion of negroes from juries” had only to do with the fact that black
Americans “were utterly disqualified by want of intelligence, experience, or moral integrity, to sit on juries . . . cannot be sustained.” Though the court had made similar rulings
in Strauder v. West Virginia (1880) and Neal v. Delaware (1881), Norris v. Alabama gave
teeth to the earlier verdicts, proving that the court would not tolerate disobedience. And,
in fact, Governor Bibb Graves of Alabama responded to the ruling by sending copies
of the decision to every solicitor and judge in the state, reminding them, “Whether we
like the decision or not, it is the patriotic duty of every citizen and the sworn duty of
every public officer to accept and uphold them in letter and in spirit. . . . This decision
means that we must put the names of Negroes in jury boxes in every county in the State.”
Though the composition of juries by no means changed overnight, the decision struck a
crucial blow to the all-white jury, that mainstay of white supremacy.
As important as the legal decisions—and, according to leaders of the Communist
Party who mounted the Scottsboro Boys’ defense, a great pressure behind the decisions—were the mass mobilizations the trials inspired around the world. In the weeks
28
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following the 1931 decision, thousands of letters and telegrams streamed in, to the great
surprise of local officials. “Although mainly from ordinary men and women,” Goodman
writes, “they [also] came from John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, Fiorello La Guardia,
Hamilton Fish, Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Maksim Gorky, and H. G. Wells.” In
June 1931, the Communist Party and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights led a
march of 1,500 through Harlem, carrying signs proclaiming “Smash the legal lynching
of the Scottsboro Boys.” Another 3,000 attended an NAACP rally in New York. In 1933,
10,000 gathered in New York’s Union Square. Other protests followed around the world
as far as Berlin and Havana. In Alabama, Rosa Parks’s husband, Raymond, worked on
the National Committee to Save the Scottsboro Boys. By many accounts, it was a formative consciousness-raising experience for the woman who would become a titan in the
history of civil rights. The movement had begun.
With such intensive media attention over such an extended period of time, the
Scottsboro trials came to be an embarrassment for the state of Alabama. Those who in
1931 expected praise for their restraint in leaving the execution to the courts instead of
29
the lynch mob had changed their tune by 1937 when charges were dropped against four
of the Boys. The Birmingham News published a piece titled “At Last We Are Rid of the
Scottsboro Case,” which concluded that “a great and troublesome burden has been lifted
from Alabama.” The Chattanooga Times, which had reported cheerily on the mob gathered outside the Scottsboro jail, now concluded, “There is no sadder story in the annals
of American jurisprudence than that of the Negroes who for the past six years have lived
in the shadow of the electric chair.”
It is a very different America today than the America that saw the arrest and indictment of the Scottsboro Boys. That is beyond dispute. Segregation and all legal barriers
have been lifted; black Americans hold the highest positions in every field. To use a
common contemporary encapsulation: We have a black president.
And yet, when it comes to interaction with the criminal justice system, the position
of black Americans is more similar to the days of Scottsboro than we would like to think.
“It hasn’t changed,” The Scottsboro Boys book writer, David Thompson, said in a recent
interview. “We just have another way to talk about it that makes us either feel better or
feel like certain issues are put to bed.”
According to The Baldus Report, a 1983 study of racial discrimination and the death
penalty, killers of white victims were 4.3 times more likely to be given the death penalty
than killers of black victims, an echo of the relative value placed on white and black
lives from the heyday of lynching. On the whole, black Americans are 6.5 times more
likely to be incarcerated than white Americans, and one in ten black men is in prison or
jail on any given day, The Sentencing Project has found. More black men are in prison
than were enslaved in 1850. Because ex-felons cannot vote, more African Americans are
disenfranchised now than were in 1870.
Sensational accounts of wrongful convictions make headlines from time to time—
such as the recent execution of Troy Davis in Georgia—but a widespread critique of
criminal justice as it is practiced in the United States (with 2.3 million people currently behind bars, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world)
is only just beginning to get airtime. As Haywood Patterson wrote in his autobiography, Scottsboro Boy, “What happened in the Scottsboro case wasn’t unusual. What was
unusual was that the world heard about it.” The world heard once; perhaps it is time for
the world to hear again.
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30
“Why the Boys Were Hated”
Excerpted from “Report on the Scottsboro, Ala. Case” (May 27, 1931)
By Hollace Ransdell
On May 15, 1931, a director of the ACLU sent Hollace Ransdell, a young journalist and teacher,
to Scottsboro to “saturate [herself ] with the whole situation as regards those eight [condemned]
Negro boys.” Ransdall spent ten days traveling around northern Alabama and southern
Tennessee, asking provocative questions of countless people directly and indirectly involved
with the case. Her unpublished report provides some of the most grounded and balanced analysis written about the Scottsboro Boys at the time; in 1931, however, her findings shocked people.
They shocked her. She was taken aback by Price and Bates—“victims themselves but mercilessly
cruel”—and by the conditions in which the southern poor were forced to subsist. A stranger to
the South, she was overwhelmed by the hostility white people had toward the black population.
“Why the Boys Were Hated” is one section of her 31-page report about the arrest, the trial, and
the backgrounds of the accusers and the defendants.
Scottsboro, the county seat of Jackson County in northern Alabama, is a charming
southern village with some 2,000 inhabitants situated in the midst of pleasant rolling
hills. Neat, well-tended farms lie all around, the deep red of their soil making a striking contrast with the rich green of the hills. The cottages of the town stand back on
soft lawns, shaded with handsome trees. A feeling of peace and leisure is in the air. The
people on the streets have easy, kind faces and greet strangers as well as each other cordially. In the Courthouse Square in the center of town, the village celebrities, such as the
mayor, the sheriff, the lawyers, lounge and chat democratically with the town eccentrics
and plain citizens.
Strolling around observing these things, it is hard to conceive that anything but
kindly feelings and gentle manners toward all mankind can stir the hearts of the citizens
of Scottsboro. It came as a shock, therefore, to see these pleasant faces stiffen, these
laughing mouths grow narrow and sinister, those soft eyes become cold and hard because
the question was mentioned of a fair trial for nine young Negroes terrified and quite
alone. Suddenly these kindly-looking mouths were saying the most frightful things.
To see people who ordinarily would be gentle and compassionate at the thought of a
child—a white one—in the least trouble, who would wince at the sight of a suffering
dog—to see these men and women transformed by blind, unreasoning antipathy so that
31
their lips parted and their eyes glowed with lust for the blood of black children, was a
sight to make one untouched by the spell of violent prejudice shrink.
The trial judge, A. E. Hawkins, a dignified, fine-looking, gray-haired southern
gentleman, who was absolutely convinced in his own mind that he had done everything
to give the Negroes a fair trial, gave himself away so obviously at every other sentence
he uttered, that any person with mind unclouded by the prejudice which infected him
could have pointed it out. The other officials and citizens with whom I discussed the
case also made it disconcertingly clear that they regarded the trial of the Negroes and the
testimony given at it, not as an honest attempt to get at the truth, but as a game where
shrewd tricks were to be used to bring about a result already decided upon in the minds
of every one of them. They all wanted the Negroes killed as quickly as possible in a way
that would not bring disrepute upon the town. They therefore preferred a sentence of
death by a judge to a sentence of death by a mob, but they desired the same result, and
were impatient with anything that slowed up the conviction and death sentence which
they all knew was coming regardless of any testimony.
They said that all Negroes were brutes and had to be held down by stern, repressive measures or the number of rapes on white women would be larger than it is. Their
point seemed to be that it was only by ruthless oppression of the Negro that any white
woman was able to escape raping at Negro hands. Starting with this notion, it followed
that they could not conceive that two white girls found riding with a crowd of Negroes
could possibly have escaped raping. A Negro will always, in their opinion, rape a white
woman if he gets the chance. These nine Negroes were riding alone with two white girls
on a freight car. Therefore, there was no question that they raped them, or wanted to
rape them, or were present while the other Negroes raped them—all of which amounts
to very much the same thing in southern eyes—and calls for the immediate death of the
Negroes regardless of these shades of difference. As one southerner in Scottsboro put it,
“We white people just couldn’t afford to let these Niggers get off because of the effect it
would have on other Niggers.”
In answering the question then, of why ordinarily kind, mild people are aroused to
such heartless cruelty against boys who have done them no harm, and if their case were
fairly investigated quite likely would be found to have harmed nobody else either, one is
brought up against the ugly fact that these pleasant people of the South, the Civil War
notwithstanding, are still living on the enslavement of the Negro race. And this brings
one to a second ugly fact, that when this is so, the subjugating race cannot afford to have
any regard for decency, honesty, kindness, or fairness in their treatment of the black race.
These traits are exclusively for relationships with their own people. The thing that stands
out above everything else in their minds is that the black race must be kept down; as
they put it, “The Nigger must be kept in his place.” Repression, terror, and torture are
the means that will do it.
32
The Pun and the Conundrum of an
American Invention
A Brief History of Minstrelsy
By Dan Rubin
The blackface minstrel show originated in the mid-19th century out of the American
populace’s ignorance and penchant for catchy music. That white actors used black
makeup was nothing new. Shakespeare’s King’s Men used the technique in their 1604
world premiere of Othello, and they weren’t the first. Minstrelsy, too, predates the genre
of cruel racism we now associate with the word. Medieval minstrels had been court
entertainers, singers of tall tales, before they were replaced by troubadours and then
took their acts on the road. When they wandered their way to the New World, minstrels
became promoters of a fledgling nationalism. Their tunes and characters championed
the first American folk heroes: the proud, rustic, and independent Yankee, who triumphs over the “high-falutin’,” and the urban Everyman (often a volunteer firefighter),
a brawler who protects the weak.
Black folk music was popular, exciting, and new to the young, white Americans of
the early 19th century. Historian John Strausbaugh equates its appeal to the rock-’n’-roll
phenomenon of the 20th century. Englishman Charles Matthews writes about attending
the African Theatre Company’s 1822 production of Hamlet in New York City: an audience member interrupted the Prince of Denmark mid soliloquy and asked him to sing
“Possum Up a Gum Tree.”At the same time, northerners young and old were hungry for
“authentic” representations of the black race subjugated by their southern brethren. A
small army of “Ethiopian Delineators” sought to fill the void. Matthews, one of the first
impersonators, visited the South and studied the dialect, songs, lore, speeches, and sermons of his black subjects. He eagerly collected “scraps and malapropos” to incorporate
into his stage character. Other performers were less diligent (most conducted no research
whatsoever), but they were still fan favorites. The industry really took off, however, with
the Jim Crow jump of Thomas Dartmouth Rice.
In 1832 Rice returned home to New York’s Bowery Theatre from a month-long
country-wide tour. He brought with him a new routine. While watching Jim Crow, an
old, lame black slave working in a stable in Louisville, Kentucky, Rice had been treated
to a catchy little dance and ditty:
33
Wheel about, an’ turn about, an’ do jis so;
Eb’ry time I wheel about, I jump Jim Crow.
Rice had found his moneymaker. He donned the humble rags of a plantation worker,
applied the customary burnt-cork-ash-and-water solution to his face, painted his lips the
traditional bright red, crooked his back, splayed his knees, and grotesquely replicated
what he had seen and heard in the South. The act was a sensation. Strausbaugh describes
it as “almost idiotic in its simplicity; yet, as with any good pop tune, there’s a quirkiness
to the melody, a curious lurch in the rhythm, that makes it stick in your mind, whether
you want it there or not.” The tune “Jump Jim Crow” circulated at the speed of a lie. And
just as Rice had stolen it from Crow, other “delineators” openly stole from Rice. Their
songs were not always consciously hurtful; many fancied they were showing a great deal
of affection and fondness in their depictions. But “authentic” they were not. They were
crude caricatures of inferiority forged in the kiln of rowdy performance halls, where
familiar (negative) stereotypes were met with the ultimate praise—a rain of pennies.
The craze for blackface solo acts, staged as part of a larger evening of entertainment,
grew into blackface bands mounting full-on, stand-alone “minstrel shows.” In 1842, four
entertainers who had performed blackface acts with touring circuses or theater troupes
joined forces to create the Virginia Minstrels. Dan Emmett played the fiddle; Billy
Whitlock played the banjo; Dick Pelham played the tambourine; and Frank Brower
played the bones (a popular slave percussion instrument, as drums were feared by white
masters, who thought slaves communicated with drum signals). They advertised themselves as a “novel, grotesque, original, and surpassingly melodious Ethiopian Band,”
promising acts “entirely exempt from the vulgarities and other objectionable features
which have hitherto characterized Negro extravaganzas.” Their evening of “Songs,
Refrains, and Ditties as sung by Southern slaves” was punctuated by spontaneous and
improvised bursts of dance, jokes, and dialogue, performed in a generalized black dialect.
Like Rice before, the Virginia Minstrels were a hit—and as before, everyone copied
the elements that made them successful, and then added a little bit more. And then a
lot more. The quartet expanded into a rustic orchestra of a dozen or more musicians.
Costumes became lavish: colorful coats with bright brass buttons and striking hats for
some scenes, exaggerated “old plantation” clothes for others. More singers, comedians,
and dancers were hired as walk-ons. What began as a concert with some vamping
between songs became an unruly and unpredictable variety show. Taking their cue from
the circus, when minstrel troupes came to town, they announced themselves with a
parade (and sometimes fireworks).
To contain the madness, rituals and characters became set. At the height of the
minstrel show’s popularity, the evening’s events were structured into three distinct acts.
The first act was devoted to song and dance, most closely resembling the original
form. The musicians would arrange themselves in a wide semicircle so they could see one
another, thus improving the coordination of the show. Mr. Interlocutor, in the center,
would act as the master of ceremonies. The organizing voice of reason amidst the chaos
34
and also the straight man, he began the show with his famous command, “Gentlemen,
be seated!”
At either end of the semicircle were the two pranksters: the endmen, Mr. Tambo
(who played the tambourine) and Mr. Bones (who played the bones). These were the
show’s stars. Set apart by their distinctive attire and even-more-ludicrous dialect, the
endmen’s performance was an endless store of puns and conundrums, riddles and oneliners. The act’s musical numbers were continuously interrupted by their antics and
then put back on track by the Interlocutor. Part one would end with a rousing ensemble
number.
The second part was called the “olio” (apparently so called because of the Spanish
word for stew, olla podrida), and it was a melting pot of entertainments. No novelty was
off limits. Anything enjoyable was welcomed: magicians, acrobats, stand-up routines.
The olio introduced the notorious “stump speech,” in which a blackface performer
would mock the soap-box orations common among politicians of the day by waxing on,
erroneously and incoherently, about any topic he wanted to tackle: from temperance and
women’s rights to how to operate a locomotive.
The evening culminated in a burlesque called the “burletta” or afterpiece, parodying a
popular novel, opera, or play. Shakespeare spoofs were always hits, and after Uncle Tom’s
Cabin was published in 1852, it was never left alone.
During the 1850s, ten major minstrel houses thrived on the same block of Broadway.
Troupes traveled the world. But as the minstrel show became fixed in its ways, it became
predictable. Once-innovative songs became tired and once-diverse characters and storylines grew flat. Through the 1880s, the minstrel show dominated popular entertainment,
but then audiences’ attention waned. They were bored. Minstrelsy relinquished its throne
to its heir, vaudeville, which had emerged from the olio. By the turn of the 20th century,
stand-alone minstrel shows had all but disappeared. Blackface performances went back
to being sideshows and interludes. On the vaudeville circuit they joined a league of other
ethnic impersonators, Strausbaugh explains, “the brawling Irish, wheedling Jews, oily
Italians, thick-headed Germans, inscrutable Chinamen, gullible country rubes, and so
on . . . [the] greenface, jewface, pastaface, potatoface, yellowface, and rubeface.”
Perhaps in a perverse attempt to compete with these other slurs—but also as a
result of deteriorating relations between the recently freed black and the nervous white
populations—minstrel performers started emphasizing the genre’s most noxiously racist
material. Ernest Hogan, a black performer, wrote the vulgar “All Coons Look Alike to
Me” in 1890, and the hateful “coon song” was born. These scores reduced black people
to crude, grotesque stereotypes of kinky-haired watermelon thieves. The songs remained
popular until World War i.
Although professional minstrel shows did not survive, blackface acts—some influenced by the abhorrent “coon song,” some sticking with older and tamer, yet no-lessoffensive, mainstays—continued strong into the 20th century. (Some argue they are
still prevalent in contemporary entertainment.) In addition to vaudeville, they could be
found on Broadway, in silent movies, and then the talkies. They were the basis for radio’s
35
Amos ’n’ Andy, which became an instant success when it first aired in 1928 and then ran
as a nightly serial until 1943 and a weekly comedy until 1955. The NAACP was able to
shut down the short-lived television adaptation when it boycotted the show’s sponsors in
1953. “The network has bowed to the change in national thinking,” CBS explained when
it pulled the show. But reruns were broadcast in syndication until 1966.
At the community theater and amateur level, minstrel shows continued into the
1970s. Guidebooks for DIY performances were published and sent by the USO to military bases and hospitals during World War ii. Minstrelsy was popular at block parties
and with glee clubs; shows were put on in prisons and as school fundraisers. A magazine
called Children’s Playmate ran a blackface-for-kids centerfold until 1951. Scottsboro Boys
composer John Kander remembers directing a minstrel show in the 1930s at a northern
Wisconsin summer camp he attended. “Minstrel shows were a part of the national culture,” he explains. “We didn’t think about how offensive that was. Now, looking back on
it, and having researched it a lot, you know what it really meant.”
Black minstrel troupes started appearing as early as the mid 1850s, and after the Civil
War, minstrels were just as likely to be black actors as blackface white actors. Minstrelsy
was a way to break into the performance business, make a decent living, and tour the
country. “The minstrel show at that time was one of the greatest outlets for talented
[black] musicians and artists,” wrote W. C. Handy, a black minstrel during the 1890s.
As the number of black troupes increased, so did the number of black audiences who
enjoyed them.
Black minstrels banked on “authenticity,” billed themselves as former slaves, and
focused their material on plantation life. They drove many white “imitation” minstrel
troupes out of business and became minstrelsy’s greatest stars. Their presence helped
ameliorate some of the most grievous stereotypes, but reinforced many more. In order
to be successful, they found they had to play the caricatures invented by their white
predecessors; some endmen even painted their black faces black. In The Scottsboro Boys,
however, something else is at play. The black actors perform minstrel roles (and white
characters) with a self-awareness that allows them to critique and repurpose the taboo
form: reinventing it to comment on how much, or how little, progress we have made
since minstrelsy’s heyday.
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36
Early Dramatizations of the
Infamous Trials
By Dan Rubin
In a perverse sense, the Scottsboro Boys were always a source of entertainment. On the
evening of their arrest, a mob of 300 was eager to take pleasure in their lynching; during
the trial weeks later, the town of Scottsboro became a carnival. In rural areas far from
theaters and concert halls, in a time before television, courthouse happenings were exciting events—distractions from the grueling daily struggle of Depression-era poverty. But
when the Boys were jailed in Birmingham following Haywood Patterson’s first retrial in
1933, even the more urbane Alabamians visited their cell as if going to the zoo. Outside
the South, reports of the trials created a global media sensation that tugged at the
heartstrings of sympathizers, who passionately followed and protested each troubling
development in the case. Throughout the 1930s, the Scottsboro Boys were a top news
item: newspapers often equated the trials to a minstrel show.
But the voyeurism reached a new level in 1937 immediately following the release and
the spiriting out of Alabama of Olen Montgomery, Willie Roberson, Eugene Williams,
and Leroy Wright in perhaps one of the oddest chapters of the Scottsboro saga. As Dan
T. Carter explains in Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South, “The release . . . came
on so suddenly that no preparations were made for their future. . . . Within hours after
arriving in New York, the four boys received more than a dozen commercial offers.”
Samuel Leibowitz, the Scottsboro Boys’ lawyer, said there would be no “exploitation,
no barnstorming, no theatricals of any kind” involving the transplanted southerners, and
he placed the four in various vocational schools to “resurrect lives almost crushed out
of them by the relentless persecution of the state of Alabama.” It was difficult for him
to compete, however: fortune was knocking at their door. Thomas S. Harten, a black
reverend from the Holy Trinity Baptist Church of Brooklyn who had a history of shady
dealings, was particularly effective at winning them over. He convinced them to break
away from Leibowitz and became their manager. “Olen Montgomery . . . mumbled that
since he was free he would be his ‘own man’ (meaning his own master) in deciding on a
career,” a New York Times reporter noted. “The others echoed that sentiment.”
A month after the release of the four Scottsboro Boys, Harten announced that his
transformed protégés—dressed in new suits and ties, hair slicked back, carrying canes
and chain-smoking cigarettes—would be taking to the vaudeville stage. A handbill for
37
their August 20 debut at Harlem’s Apollo Theater reads, “Welcome the Scottsboro
Boys. Appearing IN PERSON as a special added attraction with the novel ALL-GIRL
REVIEW . . . a cast of FIFTY FASCINATING FEMALES.” It billed the Boys as “the
symbol of a struggle for enlightenment and human brotherhood which will go on and
on until it is won!” The quartet sang, danced, and reenacted court scenes and the hour of
their release alongside professional actors playing their lawyer and the judge.
The arrangement did not last long. Harten treated his cast like theatrical sharecroppers, taking a substantial cut of the income. Moreover, expenses outweighed profits, and by the end of the first week, the enterprise was in debt. They called it quits.
Roberson stayed to work in New York. Williams moved in with family in St. Louis.
Wright and Montgomery went on a two-and-a-half month tour organized by the
Scottsboro Defense Committee, speaking in more than 40 cities to raise money and
awareness for the five Scottsboro Boys still in jail. Montgomery, who had written songs
throughout his imprisonment, bought a guitar and saxophone and continued to perform.
Harten’s show may have been the most opportunistic (and the only one to employ
any of the actual Scottsboro Boys), but it was not the first dramatization of the Boys’
plight. In fall 1931, Langston Hughes—who visited and recited his poetry to the eight
Scottsboro Boys on death row at Kilby Prison—wrote a one-act play entitled Scottsboro,
Limited. “Classic agitprop,” writes editor Leslie Catherine Sanders in her introduction
to the play, “its concise analysis of its subject, rhythmic language and choreographed
movement, audience involvement, and final call for action are all typical of the form.”
The play calls for a barren stage with one chair on a raised platform, invoking the electric
chair that shared the cellblock with the Boys. The eight condemned men enter down the
center aisle, and a white man in the audience demands, “What are you doing here?” “We
come in our chains / To show our pain,” one of the prisoners replies. After a production was blocked by the police, the play premiered in Los Angeles on May 8, 1932; other
productions followed in Paris and Moscow.
On December 14, 1933, Scottsboro “Limited”: A Radio Drama of a Famous Freight Train
Episode, edited and narrated by Hayden Roberts, was broadcast on Station WLS in
Chicago. It juxtaposed a scene of the 1931 arrest with excerpts from the dramatic 1933
retrial, in which Ruby Bates recanted and Dr. R. R. Bridges contradicted Victoria Price’s
testimony.
In 1934, Denis Donoghue’s Legal Murder ran for eight performances at New York
City’s President Theatre. “In the traditional fashion of the vaudeville stage [in which]
no one appears quite real,” as one critic described it, the facts were replaced by a story
about nine boys hopping a freight train to Chicago with dreams of becoming radio
singers. Reviewer W. A. Ucker wrote that Legal Murder is a “pretty bad [play] blighted
by a determination to depict the field hand Negro as a fellow who is constantly singing
pseudo spirituals and blues songs at such times as he is not tap-dancing and feasting on
fried chicken and other such fixin’s.”
Also premiering in 1934, John Wexley’s critically acclaimed They Shall Not Die was far
more successful than Donoghue’s attempt. After the initial run at the National Theatre
38
.3%*#ƫ5ƫScottsboro Boysƫ/!*%ƫ !/%#*!.ƫ!+31("ƫ+.%00
in Washington, D.C., was canceled, the sprawling and ambitious play (with a cast of
more than 80 performers) opened at New York’s Royale Palace. Unlike Donoghue,
Wexley did not deviate far from the facts of the case, reconstructing it as much as he
could from interviews and public documents. They Shall Not Die ran for more than 60
performances. Reviewers complimented its anger, power, realism, and accuracy.
The Scottsboro Boys, by John Kander and Fred Ebb, is not even the first musical based
on the case. Direct from Death Row: The Scottsboro Boys (An Evening of Vaudeville and
Sorrow) was written in 1980 by Mark Stein with music and lyrics by Harley White, Jr.
In the third-to-last scene, Patterson discusses the 1937 release of Montgomery, Roberson,
Williams, and Wright, but only to lament that he still languishes in jail; there is no
revival of Harten’s sensationalist act.
Direct from Death Row ends with Patterson recounting how he eventually escaped
from prison and fled north, only to find himself jailed again in Michigan.“I guess maybe
the show be over now,” he says. “Ain’t ever over, Haywood,” Andrew Wright, another
Scottsboro Boy, replies. “Who knows, Andy? Who knows?” Patterson sighs.
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39
Rosa Parks and Scottsboro
by Dan Rubin
In the spring of 1931, Rosa McCauley, a soft-spoken 18-year-old, was introduced
to Raymond Parks, a 28-year-old who worked in a black barbershop in downtown
Montgomery. A year later they were married. Other than her grandfather, Raymond
was the first man with whom Rosa discussed civil rights. He was a founding member of
Montgomery’s NAACP chapter, and his barbershop was a center for the distribution of
“race papers” like the NAACP’s journal, The Crisis, and major black newspapers, including the Pittsburgh Courier, Amsterdam News, and Chicago Defender. Like her grandfather,
Raymond “believed in being a man and expected to be treated like a man,” Rosa wrote
in her autobiography, Rosa Parks: My Story.
When they met, Raymond’s all-consuming passion was the Scottsboro Boys. “It
gnawed at him to see those innocent kids were framed,” Rosa recalled. “He’d say, ‘I’ll
never sleep until they’re free.’” He and others were secretly raising funds for the Boys’
defense. He attended bimonthly meetings of the National Committee to Defend
the Scottsboro Boys, which were conducted at night at constantly shifting locations.
Raymond would not allow Rosa to attend for fear that they would be caught by white
vigilantes or police—in fact, no women were invited. Raymond also refused to tell her
what went on at those meetings. Once, however, Raymond held a meeting at their home.
While the men sat around a small table covered with guns—“This was the first time
I’d seen so few men with so many guns. I didn’t even think to offer them something to
drink . . . I don’t know where I would have put any refreshments. No one was thinking
of food anyway.”—Rosa sat on the back porch, profoundly upset that it was so dangerous
for black men to simply hold a meeting.
Catching Raymond’s contagious fervor for righting the wrongs thrust upon the
Scottsboro Boys, Rosa read everything published about the case and quickly became as
knowledgable as her husband. It was a crash course in Depression-era race politics and
the beginning of her activism. “The whole Scottsboro ordeal was a travesty of justice. It’s
a monument to America at its worst,” she wrote. In 1943, Rosa was elected the secretary
of the Montgomery NAACP branch. “Having been politicized and deeply affected by
the injustice in the Scottsboro case,” writes scholar Danielle L. McGuire, “Parks was
especially interested in interracial rape cases” in which white men raped black women
with impunity—the true racial sexual violence that plagued the country, hidden by
inflammatory charges like those made at Scottsboro.
40
Behind the Characters
Biographies of the Primary Players in the Scottsboro Case
By Dan Rubin
The Defendants
Olen Montgomery (1914–?)
Born in Monroe, Georgia, 17-year-old Olen
Montgomery had a fifth-grade education and
was one of the few Scottsboro Boys able to
write when they were jailed in March 1931. He
quit school when he was 14 to help his mother,
first by delivering groceries, then working construction, and, finally, working at a fertilizer
plant, which he left after his boss cursed at him.
Montgomery was extremely nearsighted and
nearly blind in one eye from a cataract. Before
boarding the freight train to Memphis, he was
in Chattanooga trying to earn enough money
to buy a new pair of glasses.
Montgomery claimed that he was riding
alone in a tank car near the rear of the train
when the fight and alleged rape took place. He
never deviated from this account, and by 1937
every prosecutor connected with the Scottsboro
(!*ƫ+*0#+)!.5ƫĨ()ƫ00!ƫ
case agreed that Montgomery was innocent. .$%2!/ĥ+*0#+)!.5ƫ.$%2!/ĩ
He was one of the four Scottsboro Boys
released in July 1937.
In prison, Montgomery wrote letters for the other Scottsboro Boys and composed
songs. In 1936 he wrote to Anna Damon of the International Labor Defense (ILD):
“You can get some small six string guitars and sent it rite away please I need it. if I live
I am going to Be the Blues King. I want to surprise every Body some day Anna please
41
don’t wait a minute sent it rite on to me so I can Be practicing on these too songs that
I have made up.” His “Lonesome Jailhouse Blues,” published in the Labor Defender,
began, “All last night I walked my cell and cried / ’Cause this old jailhouse done get so
lonesome I can’t be satisfied.”
After his release in 1937, Montgomery appeared at meetings for the Scottsboro
Defense Committee (SDC), which raised money for the five Boys still incarcerated. He
hoped to start a career as a musician and bought a saxophone and a guitar. He despised
the day jobs that came his way—dishwasher, porter, etc.—and bounced back and forth
between New York City and Georgia, drinking heavily and rarely holding employment
for more than a few months. In 1940, after a night of drinking in Detroit, he passed
out on the bed of a girlfriend. Her landlady discovered them and accused him of rape, a
charge that was dropped two days later. Following this ordeal, he returned to New York,
then traveled to Connecticut and then back to New York. He was destitute throughout
the 1940s, and in 1952 he was arrested for sleeping on a subway. He was still living in New
York in 1958 or 1959 when he and Clarence Norris went to visit Willie Roberson, only to
learn that Roberson had died. Montgomery then returned to Georgia for good; by the
1979 publication of The Last of the Scottsboro Boys, he was thought to be dead.
Clarence Norris (1912–89)
Clarence Norris was an 18-year-old born in
Warm Springs, Georgia, the son of sharecroppers; his father had been born a slave. The entire
family, including Norris’s eight siblings, worked
in the fields, and Norris’s education ended in
the second grade. After a jealous neighbor shot
their horse, Norris’s father moved the family to
Neal, Georgia, which they left after the white
landowner the family worked for tried to rape
Norris’s mother. In Molena, Georgia, Norris
made friends with their new landowner’s two
sons, but that friendship ended when one of
them informed Norris, “Bubba, Momma wants
you to call me Mr. George now.”
When his father died in 1928, the 16-yearold returned to Warm Springs, where he found
work as a golf caddy. Norris lost his job after he
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and a friend were caught stealing cigars from
the clubhouse. He found himself in West Point,
Georgia, looking for work, when he met Annie Pearl, the niece of his landlady. After a
brief courtship, the two moved to Gadsden, Alabama, to work at a new Goodyear plant.
The money was decent and they rented a house together; Pearl had had enough educa-
42
tion to teach Norris simple addition, but he remained illiterate. Then Pearl fell in love
with another man and left Norris. Norris contemplated killing her for betraying him, but
he left town instead. He rode the rails in search of work. Once, he was caught and almost
killed by railroad cops; another time he was arrested for vagrancy and was sentenced to
ten days breaking up rocks in a quarry.
In 1931, he was convicted of raping Ruby Bates and Victoria Price. Norris was
retried—and again sentenced to death—in 1933. The appeal of his second trial went to
the U.S. Supreme Court, and in Norris v. Alabama the court decided that the absence
of black jurors on the jury rolls of Alabama constituted a violation of the Fourteenth
Amendment’s equal protection clause. In 1937, Norris was tried and convicted a third
time. As four of the other Scottsboro Boys were released around that time, he suspected,
“The State frame me out of the best of my life just to get those four boys free.” In 1938,
his death sentence was commuted to life in prison by Alabama Governor Bibb Graves.
In 1944 Norris was released on parole.
After skipping out on his parole to flee north, he was convinced to return to Alabama,
in large measure to improve the chances of the two remaining Scottsboro defendants.
After a dispute with his corrupt parole officer, Norris was put back in prison. Two years
later, in 1946, Norris was paroled a second time. After his release, Norris fled again, this
time assuming his brother’s identity.
Two marriages quickly began and dissolved. He was arrested a few times: for gun
possession, for gambling, and for stabbing a girlfriend. By the 1960s, Norris was living
with a third wife and their children in Brooklyn, New York. Still in violation of his
parole, Norris worked with the NAACP to find out whether he was still a wanted man.
In 1973, Norris called Alabama Governor George Wallace: “I want to know if Alabama
still wants me,” he asked. It did.
Norris requested a pardon. Alabama Parole and Pardon Board Chairman Norman
Ussery required that Norris first turn himself in and reinstate parole before a pardon
could be considered. The NAACP stepped up a successful public relations campaign and
the parole board voided Norris’s parole delinquency. On October 25, 1976, Norris was
officially declared not guilty for the rape of Price and Bates.
Norris’s The Last of the Scottsboro Boys: An Autobiography was published in 1979. In
the 1980s, Norris was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. He died on January 23, 1989.
Haywood Patterson (1912–52)
Haywood Patterson, the fourth of nine siblings, was born in 1912 on a farm near
Elberta, Georgia, the son of sharecroppers. When he was nine, the family moved to
Chattanooga, Tennessee, where his father got work at a steel plant. Young Patterson
made deliveries for Jewish merchants on his bicycle to help out, but when he was 14 he
decided he could best save his family money by not eating at home. He stayed out of
the house more, “finding rough young friends like myself also not afraid to see the world
and make their way,” he wrote in his autobiography, Scottsboro Boy. He started hopping
43
on freight trains, and by 16 he was an expert
hobo: “I knew all the nearby states, southeast to
Georgia and down to Pensacola, Florida, north
to Ohio, west to Arkansas. I knew the train
schedules, when the freights left and where they
arrived. I could light a butt in the wind on top
of a moving boxcar.”
Patterson was 18 when he boarded the
Chattanooga-to-Memphis freight on March
25, 1931, with three friends: Andy and Roy
Wright and Eugene Williams. He was “viewed
as the most guilty and most defiant of the
boys, who prosecutors chose as their first target
after the initial convictions from the first trials
were overturned,” writes historian Douglas O.
Linder. “It was Patterson who faced the most
trials and convictions (four between 1931 and
1937), did the hardest time in Alabama prisons,
53++ ƫ00!./+*ƫĨ()ƫ00!ƫ
managed the most prison escapes (two), and
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whose story was first told in the book Scottsboro
Boy.”
Patterson entered jail with little education, but, after eight months in prison—with
the help of a bible, a dictionary, and guidance from other prisoners—he was writing
letters home and reading whatever he could get his hands on. Patterson was not particularly well-liked by the other Scottsboro Boys (Clarence Norris swore he would kill him
if he had the chance; even the Wright brothers turned on him for being overbearing and
arrogant), and he was often accused by the guards of being a troublemaker: “The jailers,
they believed I was putting ideas into the other eight boys’ heads. They figured I was
teaching them how to rebel,” he wrote.
After his final trial and the 1937 release of four of the nine Scottsboro Boys, the
warden of Kilby Prison (where the Boys had been housed on death row) refused to take
Patterson back, saying, “I’ll take all the boys and keep them here with me and help them.
But that nigger there—Haywood Patterson—I don’t want him here. Kilby Prison isn’t
big enough for him. He’s the kind of a nigger, he just disrespect white folks. He just
disrupt us. You can send him south.” Haywood was sent to Atmore State Prison Farm,
deep in Alabama. It was known throughout the state as “Murderers’ Home,” because
if an inmate murdered another inmate, the authorities simply added a few years to his
sentence. During his time there, Patterson was stabbed in the lung by a cellmate who
had made a deal with one of the prison workers. He barely survived.
Patterson spent 16 years in Alabama courtrooms and prisons. Both of his parents
died while he was inside. Patterson was sentenced to death three times before receiving a 75-year sentence from his fourth jury. Patterson managed two escapes. The first,
44
from Atmore in April 1943, gave Patterson five days of freedom before he was turned
in. The second escape, from Kilby, occurred on July 17, 1948, when Patterson was working on a prison farm. After a few close calls, Patterson made his way to Atlanta, then
Chattanooga, then to the home of his sister in Detroit—using the freight trains he knew
so well. For the next three years, Patterson lived underground. He made contact with
Scottsboro supporters and told his story in Scottsboro Boy, published in 1950. Shortly
after, Patterson was arrested by the FBI, but Michigan Governor G. Mennen Williams
refused to extradite him to Alabama after a nationwide letter-writing campaign was
mounted on Patterson’s behalf.
In December 1950, Patterson was arrested for killing a man in a barroom brawl.
Patterson claimed self-defense. His first trial ended in a hung jury, the second in a
mistrial, and the third with a manslaughter conviction. In 1952, less than a year into his
sentence in the Michigan State Prison, Patterson died of cancer at age 39.
Ozie Powell (1916–?)
Ozie Powell was born in rural Georgia to an
abusive father who left the family when Powell
was a small boy. His mother remarried and
they moved to Atlanta, where Powell attended
school for just three months. He worked odd
jobs as a boy, and when he was 13 he started
working at sawmills and lumber camps. At
14, he ran away from home and bounced
from highway camps to sawmills for weeks or
months at a time. He was 15 when he was jailed
in Scottsboro; he claimed not to have been
involved in the fight that broke out on the train
(he arrived too late to participate), but he testified that he had witnessed it.
In the 1931 trial, Powell was tried with Willie
Roberson, Andy Wright, Eugene Williams,
and Olen Montgomery; it was under his name 6%!ƫ+3!((ƫĨ()ƫ00!ƫ.$%2!/ĥ
that the appeal went before the U.S. Supreme +*0#+)!.5ƫ.$%2!/ĩ
Court. Powell v. Alabama ruled that the defendants had not received adequate counsel.
In January 1936, leaving the courthouse after Patterson’s fourth trial, Powell was
loaded into a car with Norris and Roy Wright. The three were handcuffed together
in the backseat, while Sheriff J. Street Sandlin and his deputy, Edgar Blalock, rode in
front. Norris recounts what followed in his autobiography, The Last of the Scottsboro Boys:
Blalock started in cussing our “Communist, Jew, northern lawyers.” He said
we’d come out a damn sight better if we had southern lawyers. Ozie Powell told
45
him, “I wouldn’t give up the help I have for no damn southern lawyer that I’ve
seen.” Blalock wheeled around and slapped him. . . . Blalock said, “These sons
of bitches should have been killed a long time ago—riding up and down the
highway like white people.” Ozie pulled out his knife, yanked Blalock’s head
back against the seat, and slit his throat. Blood shot everywhere.
Sandlin stopped the car, got out, and, after shouting, “I am going to get rid of all
these sons of bitches right now,” fired a bullet into Powell’s brain. Blalock was rushed
to a hospital; he needed ten stitches. Powell was driven all the way back to the jail in
Birmingham and left in the yard before he was given medical attention. Miraculously,
he also survived, but with permanent brain damage. He suffered from trouble speaking,
hearing and memory loss, and weakness in his right leg and arm. In 1937, Powell pleaded
guilty to assault and was sentenced to 20 years; the rape charge was dropped. He was
finally released in 1946 and moved back to Georgia, where he fell off the public radar.
Willie Roberson (1915–58/59)
Willie Roberson was born in Columbus,
Georgia. His father walked out on the family
when Roberson was two months old, and his
mother died when he was two years old. He
was raised by his maternal grandmother in
Atlanta. He reached the seventh grade before
quitting school to work as a hotel busboy. He
left Atlanta in 1931, hoping to find better work
in Chattanooga; when that failed, he decided
to try his luck in Memphis. He was looking
not only for work, but also for a free hospital to
treat his severe cases of syphilis and gonorrhea.
On March 25, 1931, the 17-year-old, wracked
with pain, was alone in a boxcar near the
caboose of the train. During his first two years
of imprisonment, he was given no treatment for
his ailments, which also included asthma.
%((%!ƫ+!./+*ƫĨ()ƫ00!ƫ
.$%2!/ĥ+*0#+)!.5ƫ.$%2!/ĩ
Roberson was one of the four Scottsboro
Boys released in 1937, having served six years
without a retrial. He settled into steady work in New York City. In 1942, he was in a
Harlem social club when a fight broke out. Although not involved, he was arrested and
charged with disorderly conduct. Of that incident he wrote, “I am again a victim of
almost inconceivable malignity and though I hartily dislike the role of myrter I have
been cast in that role and it seems impossible to escape it.” Roberson’s asthma had been
greatly aggravated by his time in jail and he was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment
in 1958 or 1959 having died from an asthma attack.
46
Charlie Weems (1911–?)
At 19, Atlanta-born Charlie Weems was the
oldest Scottsboro Boy. His mother died when
he was four and only one of his seven siblings survived beyond childhood. He completed
school through the fifth grade, but he quit
to take a job at a pharmacy when his father
became unable to work. When his dad grew
ill, he sent Weems to live with an aunt in
Riverdale, Georgia, where he attended school
and continued to work—first on a road gang
and then on a farm.
Weems was one of the boys involved in the
racially charged brawl on the freight train. He
was convicted of raping Price and Bates in the
1931 trial and again in a 1937 retrial, at which he
received a sentence of 75 years. Even though he
kept a clean prison record, prison was hard for $.(%!ƫ!!)/ƫĨ()ƫ00!ƫ
.$%2!/ĥ+*0#+)!.5ƫ.$%2!/ĩ
Weems. He complained of receiving inadequate
food and missing “the ladies out in the world.”
In 1934, he was beaten and tear-gassed for reading Communist literature provided by the
ILD, which caused permanent damage to his eyes. In 1937, he contracted tuberculosis,
and in 1938 he was stabbed by a prison-mill
foreman who mistook him for Andy Wright.
Weems was paroled in 1943. He told reporters he was going to forget about “the part of
his life just past, work hard, and make a man”
of himself. He moved back to Atlanta, where
he took a job in a laundry, which he did not
enjoy, but kept for the sake of the other boys:
“I want to See them free and do not wish to do
anything that would harm them,” he wrote in a
letter to the ILD. By 1946, he was married and,
by all reports, living a quiet life. Nothing else is
known about his life after prison.
Eugene Williams (1918–?)
1#!*!ƫ%((%)/ƫĨ()ƫ00!ƫ
.$%2!/ĥ+*0#+)!.5ƫ.$%2!/ĩ
Eugene Williams was only 13 in 1931. He was
born in Chattanooga and worked there as a
dishwasher at a café. He was traveling with
his friends Patterson and the Wright brothers
47
when he was taken off the train. The Supreme Court of Alabama struck down his 1931
Scottsboro conviction because of his youth, but he was kept in prison, without a retrial,
until his release in 1937. After the charges were dropped, he moved to St. Louis to live
with relatives and enroll in the Western Baptist Seminary. Nothing is known about his
life after he moved to the Midwest.
Andrew “Andy” Wright (1912–?)
Andy Wright was 19 years old when he boarded
the train with his younger brother. Born in
Chattanooga, he did well in school and could
read and write a bit, but had to quit in the sixth
grade after his father died to help his mother
support his brother and younger sister. At age
12, he started driving a truck for a local produce
distributor. Seven years later, he was let go and
worked at a furniture store until he decided
to take a Southern Railroad freight train to
Memphis, where it was rumored there were
government jobs hauling logs.
Wright was convicted of raping Price and
Bates in 1931 and sentenced to death; at his
retrial in 1937, he was sentenced to 99 years in
jail. In Kilby Prison in Montgomery, Alabama,
he was assaulted by both guards and prisoners,
* .!3ƫ.%#$0ƫĨ()ƫ00!ƫ
.$%2!/ĥ+*0#+)!.5ƫ.$%2!/ĩ
and he spent time in the prison hospital. His
continual poor health made it difficult for him
to work, leading to further abuse. Wright narrowly escaped an attack from a prisonmill foreman when Weems was working at Wright’s station and received knife wounds
intended for him. In despair, Wright wrote from prison in 1939, “a person can be brave
for a certain length of time and then he is coward down. that the way it is with me. for
It seems as though I have been in here for century an century.”
Nevertheless, in October 1938, when he, along with Weems, Norris, and Patterson,
received an audience with Governor Graves, who had the power to pardon them, Wright
refused to lie and confess to a crime he had not commited—even when doing so would
have led to his freedom. He wrote to Allan Knight Chalmers, chairman of the SDC, “If
anyone thinks that I am going to say I’m guilty when I am not and tell a lie on myself or
anyone else he’s crazy. If that’s the way I will have to get out of prison, I will always be
here.” He was rejected by the Pardon Board in 1940, 1941, and 1942. He finally received
parole in 1944, but he was in and out of Kilby Prison for the next six years: once for
jumping his parole; a couple of times for arguing with corrupt employers; and again for
a traffic accident. In 1950, he finally moved north.
48
For about a year, life was relatively good. Even though he was distrustful of everyone
and hated being under constant surveillance by his parole officers, he landed a good job
at a rayon mill in Albany, New York. Everything fell apart when an ex-girlfriend accused
him of raping her 13-year-old foster daughter. Wright was arrested, beaten in the back
room of a police station, and charged with first-degree rape. In February 1952, after he
had spent eight months in jail, an all-white jury found him not guilty. “Everywhere I
go, it seems like Scottsboro is throwed up in my face. . . . I don’t believe I’ll ever live it
down,” he wrote.
Wright worked in New York and Albany for the next three years. During a fight with
his wife, he stabbed her. She wasn’t seriously hurt, and he received a suspended sentence,
but he had to leave Albany. He tried his luck in Cleveland, only to return to New York
a few months later without a plan. “Now I am dumbfound,” he wrote, “really dont no
what to do as I realize I have Been a big burden to the NAACP since I been out But
I really dont means to be I honestly tries hard it seems as though Bad luck just follows
me.” In the late 1950s, Wright settled in Connecticut; what happened to him after that
point is unknown.
Leroy “Roy” Wright (1918–59)
Roy Wright was a young-looking 13-year-old when he was jailed in Scottsboro—the
youngest of the Scottsboro Boys. He quit school early to work in a grocery store in his
hometown of Chattanooga, and he was often in the company of his older brother, Andy.
The journey to Memphis was his first trip away from home; his mother did not even
know he had left.
In Scottsboro, one of the militiamen sent by the governor to protect the Boys stabbed
Wright’s cheek with a bayonet. During the first round of trials in 1931—after being
threatened and severely beaten while he was in the courthouse—Wright testified that
he saw the other defendants rape Price and Bates. He later told a reporter:
Then the trial stopped awhile and the deputy sheriff beckoned to me to come
out into another room—the room back of the place the judge was sitting—and
I went. They whipped me and it seemed like they was going to kill me. All the
time they kept saying, “Now will you tell?” and finally it seemed like I couldn’t
stand no more and I said yes.
Wright was the only one not sentenced to death in 1931. The judge had to declare a
mistrial when 11 jurors held out for the death penalty, even though, in view of his age,
the prosecution had only asked for a life sentence; one juror voted for life imprisonment.
From prison, he wrote,
Oh, to think what I am charged with. If there is a god as they say he knows I
am not guilty of such hideous crime. . . . You know I am idle in here and I think
the whole thing over and over. To think there is people so unjust that they put
things on people they don’t know anything about. Well, nevertheless the good
49
lord don’t like ugly things so I’ll trust in him for those that try to punish me
for a deed I didn’t commit.
Wright served six years, without retrial, before all charges were dropped in 1937. He liked
to read and kept a bible with him always. LIFE magazine described him as the “youngest
and smartest of the Boys.”
After being released, he went on a national, two-and-a-half-month, 40-city tour
with the Scottsboro Defense Committee to raise money and awareness for his brother
and the other Scottsboro Boys still in jail. He then entered vocational school in New
York, served in the army, married, and took a job with the merchant marine. In 1959,
Wright became convinced that his wife had been unfaithful while he was away at sea:
he killed her, and then himself.
The Accusers
Victoria Price (?–1982)
Victoria Price was originally from Fayetteville, Tennessee, but at the time of the
Scottsboro trial, she lived in Huntsville, Alabama, in a small shack with her old, decrepit
mother. She reported her age variously as 19, 20, and 21; her mother said it was 24; social
workers said it was 27. She began working at the age of 10, alongside her mother as a
spinner in a mill; after her mother suffered a bad fall, Price’s income was all the money
they had. Price met Ruby Bates working at the Margaret Spinning Mill, an old-fashioned plant where working conditions were especially dismal and shifts were low-paying
and scarce. “High standards of morality, of health, of sanitation, do not thrive under such
conditions,” reported Hollace Ransdell in her 1931 report to the ACLU. “It is a rare mill
family that is not touched in some form by prostitution, disease, prison, insane asylum,
and drunkenness.”
By the time of the first Scottsboro trial, Price had been married multiple times and
convicted of adultery for sleeping with a married man; her reputation as a hard-drinking
prostitute was widely established in Huntsville and Chattanooga. Neighbors reported
that black men had been among her clientele. The chief deputy sheriff of Huntsville
admitted he had not bothered Price because she was a “quiet prostitute, and didn’t go
rarin’ around cuttin’ up in public and walkin’ the streets solicitin’, but just took men
quiet-like.” Ransdell described her as “a lively, talkative young woman, cocky in manner and not bad to look at. . . . The attention which has come to her from the case has
clearly delighted her. She talks of it with zest, slipping in many vivid and earthy phrases.
Details spoken of in the local press as ‘unprintable’ or ‘unspeakable’ she gives off-hand
in her usual chatty manner, quite unabashed by their significance.”
After using Price’s testimony to secure convictions in 16 trials over five years, the
prosecution revealed its own doubts about Price’s veracity. After her last time taking the
stand in 1937, Price faded into obscurity, married twice more, and settled in Tennessee. In
50
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1976, after NBC aired the made-for-television movie Judge Horton and the Scottsboro Boys,
Price resurfaced (having changed her name to Katherine Queen Victory Street) to file a
defamation and invasion of privacy suit against the network. The case was dismissed. In
1982, she died without ever having apologized for her role in the injustice visited upon
the Scottsboro Boys.
Ruby Bates (1915–76)
Ruby Bates, the younger of the two girls (17 at the time of the first trial), had a better
reputation than her friend. Social workers said she had been quiet and well-behaved
before she took up with Price. After her family escaped from her alcoholic, abusive
father, Bates lived in a bare but clean shack with her mother in Huntsville. Hers was
the only white family on the block in a black section of town. Even after the trials
began, her younger siblings were seen playing with the black children in the neighborhood, oblivious to the racially charged storm their sister had unleashed. Bates’s mother
had worked in the mills for many years and took in “boarders”; neighbors reported she
was frequently drunk and took men for money whenever possible. Bates herself was
51
frequently described as a “notorious prostitute,” renting a room at a boarding house
where she often had “Negro men in her room all night,” according to the affidavit of a
Chattanooga resident.
Once the trials got underway, Bates became extremely bitter toward Price, who captured the spotlight and pushed Bates to the background. Bates resented that Price’s masterful performance made her look stupid by comparison. She could not identify any of
her attackers and failed to corroborate Price on key points of her testimony; rather than
doubt Price’s accusation, the jury just assumed Bates was dim. In 1932, Bates drunkenly
wrote a letter to her then boyfriend, Earl Streetman, in which she denied having been
raped: “Those Negroes did not touch me. . . . i hope you will believe me the law dont. .
. . i wish those Negroes are not Burnt on account of me.” At the end of 1932 she disappeared to New York City, where she visited a prominent minister named Harry Emerson
Fosdick. Fosdick encouraged her to return to Alabama and tell the truth.
In 1933, Bates was a surprise witness for the defense in Haywood Patterson’s first
retrial. She recanted her story of the rape, confessing that she had been encouraged by
Price to make the false accusation as a way of protecting themselves from possible jail
time. Bates became an object of intense southern scorn, and she had to be whisked into
hiding by heavily armed deputies. She was not allowed to testify again.
After the 1933 trial, Bates joined the ILD campaign for the release of the Scottsboro
Boys, appearing at rallies and parades alongside the mothers of the Scottsboro Boys. To
a crowd in Baltimore, she said, “I want to tell you that the Scottsboro Boys were framed
by the bosses of the South and two girls. I was one of the girls and I want you to know
that I am sorry I said what I did at the first trial, but I was forced to say it. Those boys
did not attack me and I want to tell you all right here now that I am sorry that I caused
them all this trouble for two years, and now I am willing to join hands with black and
white to get them free.” In 1940, Bates moved to Washington state, where she married
and started going by the name Lucille. She returned to Alabama in the 1960s. She died
on October 27, 1976, at age 63.
Others
Samuel Leibowitz (1893–1978)
After the initial Scottsboro trial in 1931, the ILD hired Samuel Leibowitz, a Jewish lawyer from New York, to defend the Boys. Leibowitz was the son of Romanian immigrants
who moved to America to escape anti-Semitism. He attended college and law school
at Cornell University before becoming a criminal lawyer with an impeccable record.
Some considered him to be the next Clarence Darrow. Over his 15-year career, he had
represented 78 defendants on trial for murder: none were convicted. Leibowitz was not
a Communist (in fact, he was a mainstream Democrat who had never been associated
with class-based causes), but he agreed to fight (without pay) for the Boys. He told
52
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the ILD, “Your organization and I are not in agreement in our political and economic
views,” but that he would take the case to defend “the basic rights of man.” The ILD’s
choice of Leibowitz helped convince many skeptics that they were serious about saving
the Boys—and not just about promoting their radical political and economic agendas.
Although a passionate, well-prepared, and savvy litigator, Leibowitz was hampered
by his status as a northerner in a southern courtroom. He challenged southern conventions by demanding that the prosecution treat black witnesses with respect while not
hedging his cross-examination of the difficult Price. He became one of the most hated
people in Alabama. Death threats were made against him; five members of the National
Guard were assigned to protect him at all times—with another 150 on call to defend
against a possible lynch mob.
Leibowitz was stunned by the loss of the Patterson retrial in 1933. He did not help
his chances of future success when he compared the verdict to “the act of spitting on the
tomb of Abraham Lincoln” and insulted the jury to a New York crowd: “If you ever saw
those creatures, those bigots whose mouths are slits in their faces, whose eyes pop out
like a frog’s, whose chins drip tobacco juice, bewhiskered and filthy, you would not ask
how they could do it.” Leibowitz lost his next two retrials before Judge William Callahan
before successfully arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court in Norris v. Alabama, convincing the court that the absence of black jury members deprived the defendants of
the equal protection under the law guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Even
still, Leibowitz was frustrated by the trials in Alabama, where prejudice made justice
impossible.
In 1937, Leibowitz struck a compromise with Thomas Knight (the prosecuting lawyer
and attorney general of Alabama), which resulted in the release of four of the Scottsboro
53
Boys. He then took a backseat to a local defense attorney, worrying that his presence
hurt the chances of the Boys who remained in jail. After the Scottsboro trials, Leibowitz
served as a notoriously tough New York Supreme Court judge. He died in 1978.
International Labor Defense
Leaders of the International Labor Defense—founded in 1925 as a legal arm of the
Communist Party of the United States to counter groups like the Ku Klux Klan and
to defend high-profile, controversial cases—read of the Scottsboro Boys’ arrests in the
press and sent representatives to watch the first trial. Immediately following the verdicts
they started the appeal process. Although the NAACP fought for control of the Boys’
defense, worrying that the Communists were using the situation to promote the party,
the ILD won over the Boys’ parents, who persuaded their sons to follow the advice of the
ILD. Andy Wright explained to the NAACP, “If you can’t trust your mother, who can
you trust?” To dispel accusations that they were going to martyr the Boys, the ILD hired
a prominent attorney, Walter Pollak, for the first appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, and
Samuel Leibowitz for the subsequent trials. In 1935, the ILD joined the ACLU and
NAACP to create the Scottsboro Defense Committee.
NAACP
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded in
1909 by leading black and white Americans concerned about the condition of black
Americans. In particular, the group was formed in response to lynchings in the South.
The NAACP hesitated before involving itself in the Scottsboro case, keeping their distance until they were certain of the Boys’ innocence. By the time the NAACP made the
decision to defend the Boys, the ILD had already taken control. A bitter battle between
the two institutions ended when the parents of the Scottsboro Boys convinced their sons
to stay with the ILD. “We are not too ignorant to know a bunch of liars and fakers when
we meet up with them,” Mamie Williams, mother of Eugene Williams, argued, “and not
too ignorant to know that if we let the NAACP look after our boys, that they will die.”
Even so, the NAACP remained an active spectator, providing support for the defendants
and their families. After the 1937 release of Montgomery, Roberson, Williams, and Roy
Wright, the NAACP helped them find jobs; in the 1970s, they helped negotiate a pardon
for Norris.
SOURCESƫ 'ƫ $!*#Čƫ +*0!*0ƫ .+ 1!.Čƫ Scottsboro: An American TragedyČƫ ċ+.#Ďƫ )!/ƫ
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54
A Scottsboro Boys Timeline
1868
Before the Trials
The Fourteenth Amendment defines
citizenship to include all people born
or naturalized in the United States and
expands the federal government’s power
over states to protect all Americans’ rights.
1863
The Emancipation Proclamation is issued
by President Lincoln, legally freeing all
slaves in the Confederacy.
1870
1865
The Fifteenth Amendment states that
the right to vote cannot be denied on the
basis of “race, color, or previous condition
of servitude.”
The Thirteenth Amendment formally
abolishes slavery. It is the beginning
of Reconstruction, a period during
which the federal government pressures
Confederate states to return to the Union
and accept emancipation. Confederate
states pass and implement “Black Codes,”
laws intended to limit the freedom of
black Americans and legally establish
white supremacy. Former slaves are prohibited from all but field work; unemployed black men can be seized and
auctioned to planters as laborers; black
children can be taken from their families
and forced to work.
1877
Reconstruction policies officially end.
1881
Tennessee passes the first “Jim Crow”
segregation laws.
1892
Ida B. Wells-Barnett begins her antilynching campaign.
1866
1896
Congress passes the Civil Rights Bill,
granting citizenship to all male persons
in the United States “without distinction
of race or color, or previous condition of
slavery or involuntary servitude.” The
KKK is founded in Tennessee.
In Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme
Court rules that “separate but equal” public facilities are constitutional.
55
April 7–8: Haywood Patterson is tried,
convicted, and sentenced to death.
1909
The NAACP is founded.
April 8–9: Olen Montgomery, Ozie Powell,
Willie Roberson, Eugene Williams, and
Andy Wright are tried together, convicted,
and sentenced to death.
1910–20
During the Great Migration, six million black southerners move to northern
industrial towns, sparking race riots.
April 9: The trial of 13-year-old Roy
Wright ends in a mistrial. The eight
condemned are moved to Kilby Prison’s
death row; Roy Wright stays in the
Jefferson County Jail in Birmingham.
The Scottsboro Trials
1931
March 25: During a dispute on a
freight train headed from Chattanooga
to Memphis, a group of black hoboes
force a group of white hoboes off the
train. The white gang alerts authorities.
In Paint Rock, Alabama, a mob takes
nine black boys off the train with the
intention of charging them with assault
and attempted murder. Two white girls,
dressed in overalls, are also removed, and
they, along with the black and white
boys, are taken into custody. Jailed in
the nearby town of Scottsboro, the girls,
Victoria Price and Ruby Bates, accuse the
black boys of raping them on the train.
News spreads quickly, and the National
Guard is called in to protect the accused
from a growing lynch mob.
April 25: The International Labor Defense
(ILD) launches a worldwide protest of
the verdicts and thousands march in
Harlem to free the Scottsboro Boys.
June 22: The ILD files an appeal and the
Boys’ executions are stayed.
1932
February: In a letter, Bates denies having
been raped by the Scottsboro Boys.
March 24: In a 6-to-1 vote, the Alabama
Supreme Court upholds the convictions
of all but Williams, whose verdict it
reverses on the grounds that he was a
juvenile at the time of the alleged crime.
March 26: The Boys are moved to a jail in
Gadsen, Alabama, to ensure their safety.
November 7: In Powell v. Alabama, the
U.S. Supreme Court reverses the convictions of Montgomery, Norris, Patterson,
Powell, Roberson, Weems, and Andy
Wright on the grounds that they did not
receive adequate representation, a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.
March 30: The Scottsboro Boys are
indicted for rape; all plead not guilty.
April 6–7: In the court of Judge A. E.
Hawkins, Clarence Norris and Charlie
Weems are tried together. They are convicted and sentenced to death.
56
1933
1935
March 6: At the request of Samuel
Leibowitz, the new lawyer hired by the
ILD to defend the Scottsboro Boys,
Judge Hawkins grants a change of venue
to Decatur—still short of moving the
trial out of rural Alabama to Birmingham,
as the defense desired. The case will be
argued before Judge James Horton.
February 15–April 1: In Norris v. Alabama,
argued by Leibowitz, the U.S. Supreme
Court reverses Norris’s conviction (and,
thus, Patterson’s) on the grounds that
the Alabama court knowingly kept black
citizens out of the jury pool.
November 13: A black man sits on an
Alabama jury for the first time.
March 27–April 9: Patterson is retried.
The defense is helped by Bates, who testifies that she lied during the first trial, and
by Dr. R. R. Bridges, who testifies that
the physical examination of the girls just
hours after the supposed rape refutes the
accusations made by Price. Patterson is
found guilty for a second time and again
sentenced to death. Judge Horton postpones the trials of the other boys, fearing
that local tensions are too strained to
ensure a “just and impartial verdict.”
December 19: The Scottsboro Defense
Committee is formed, uniting the efforts
of the ILD, the NAACP, and the ACLU.
1936
January 23: Patterson is tried a fourth
time—again before Judge Callahan—and
sentenced to 75 years in prison. This is the
first time in Alabama history that a black
man is sentenced to anything other than
death for the rape of a white woman.
June 22: Judge Hor ton sets aside
Patterson’s conviction and orders a new
trial on the grounds that the evidence did
not warrant the jury’s decision. (Horton
will lose his bid for reelection the following year because of this.)
January 24: As he is transported back
to prison after Patterson’s trial, Powell
argues with deputy Edgar Blalock, who
slaps him. Powell slashes Blalock’s neck
with a pen knife. Sheriff Sandlin shoots
Powell in the head. Both Blalock and
Powell survive.
November–December: Patterson is tried
for a third time, this time before the hostile Judge William Callahan. He is found
guilty and sentenced to death. Norris is
tried for a second time, convicted, and
sentenced to death.
December: Concerned with the political
and economic costs of the ongoing trials,
attorney general and prosecuting lawyer Thomas Knight secretly meets with
Leibowitz to negotiate a compromise.
1934
1937
October 1: Two lawyers associated with
the ILD are caught with $1,500 intended
as a bribe to persuade Price to change in
her testimony.
May 17: Knight dies.
57
July 12–24: Norris is tried for a third time,
convicted, and sentenced to death. Andy
Wright and Weems are both tried for a
second time and convicted; Wright gets 90
years, Weems gets 75. Powell pleads guilty
to assaulting Blalock and is sentenced
to 20 years; the rape charge is dropped.
Norris, Powell, Weems, and Andy Wright
are returned to Kilby Prison; the unruly
Patterson is sent to Atmore Prison Farm
(also known as Murderers’ Home).
As part of the compromise struck
by Knight before his death, the charges
against Montgomery and Roberson are
dropped on the grounds that the state
no longer believes the men to be guilty;
the charges against Williams and Roy
Wright are dropped because of their age
at the time of the alleged crime and the
number of years already served.
to Kilby following a dispute with his
parole officer.
1946
Powell is paroled and returns to Georgia.
Norris is paroled for a second time; in
violation of his parole, he flees north and
assumes the identity of his brother. Andy
Wright is returned to Kilby for violating
his parole.
1948
Patterson escapes from Kilby and flees to
Detroit.
President Truman desegregates the
military.
1950
Patterson’s autobiography, Scottsboro Boy,
is published. The FBI arrests Patterson,
but Michigan Governor G. Mennen
Williams refuses to extradite him to
Alabama. Patterson kills a man in a
Detroit barroom brawl and is arrested.
Andy Wright is paroled.
After the Trials
1938
Alabama Governor Bibb Graves commutes Norris’s sentence to life imprisonment. Months later, he interviews the
remaining defendants, expecting them to
admit their guilt in exchange for pardons.
None do. Graves denies their pardon
applications.
1951
Andy Wright is found not guilty of raping the 13-year-old foster daughter of an
ex-girlfriend after spending eight months
in jail. He settles in Connecticut. In
Michigan, Patterson is found guilty of
manslaughter.
1943
Patterson escapes from Atmore but
is caught five days later and returned.
Weems is paroled and moves back to
Atlanta.
1952
August 24: Patterson dies in prison of
lung cancer.
1944
Norris and Andy Wright are paroled;
after ten months Norris is returned
58
1954
1965
In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka,
Kansas, the U.S. Supreme Court rules
unanimously against school segregation,
overturning its 1896 decision in Plessy v.
Ferguson.
The Voting Rights Act is passed, outlawing practices used in the South to disenfranchise African American voters.
1967
1955
Thurgood Marshall becomes first black
justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy
from Chicago, is murdered for whistling
at a white woman in Mississippi. Rosa
Parks refuses to give up her seat on a
Montgomery, Alabama, bus, triggering a
year-long bus boycott.
1972
The Equal Employment Opportunity
Act is passed, prohibiting job discrimination on the basis of race (among other
things) and laying the groundwork for
affirmative action.
1958/59
1976
Roberson dies in his Brooklyn apartment during an asthma attack. Soon after,
Montgomery moves back to Georgia for
good.
October 25: After living for 30 years in
violation of his parole, Norris is pardoned
by the state of Alabama with the help of
the NAACP.
1959
1979
Suspecting her of infidelity, Roy Wright
kills his wife, then himself.
Norris publishes The Last of the Scottsboro
Boys: An Autobiography.
1963
1989
Martin Luther King, Jr., delivers his “I
Have a Dream” speech to a crowd of more
than 200,000 gathered in Washington,
D.C.
January 23: Norris dies. With the whereabouts of Montgomery, Powell, Weems,
Williams, and Andy Wright unknown, it
is thought that Norris was the last surviving Scottsboro Boy.
1964
President Johnson signs the Civil Rights
Act, which gives the federal government
far-reaching powers to prosecute discrimination in employment, voting, and
education.
59
Questions to Consider
1. How does The Scottsboro Boys subvert the genre of minstrelsy? How does the use of
that form work as social commentary? Why were minstrel shows popular for more than
a century? Why did they become taboo?
2. Which parts of the production employ caricature? What is the effect of this device?
3. Why did the Scottsboro Boys become a cause célèbre in the 1930s?
4. In what ways has America changed since the Scottsboro trials? In what ways has it
stayed the same?
5. What is the purpose of The Lady in The Scottsboro Boys?
6. Have you ever told a lie to save yourself? Did that lie put someone else in jeopardy?
For Further Information . . .
Acker, James R. Scottsboro and Its Legacy. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2008.
Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow. New York: The New Press, 2010.
Carter, Dan T. Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State
University Press, 1969.
Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race, and Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1981.
Goodman, James. Stories of Scottsboro: The Rape Case That Shocked 1930’s America and Revived
the Struggle for Equality. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994.
Leve, James. Kander and Ebb. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009.
Miller, James A. Remembering Scottsboro: The Legacy of an Infamous Trial. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2009.
Norris, Clarence, and Sybil D. Washington. The Last of the Scottsboro Boys: An Autobiography.
New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1979.
Patterson, Haywood, and Earl Conrad. Scottsboro Boy. New York: Doubleday & Company,
1950.
Ransdell, Hollace. “Report on the Scottsboro, Ala. Case.” May 27, 1931. Unpublished.
http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scottsboro/SB_HRrep.html#REPORT%20
ON%20THE%20SCOTTSBORO,%20ALA.
Strausbaugh, John. Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult & Imitation in American Popular
Culture. New York: Jeremy P. Tracher/Penguin, 2006.
Toll, Robert C. Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1974.
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