Scottsboro Boys and Langston Hughes

 

Yesterday in class, we studied the Scottsboro Boys Case...on March 25, 1931 a fight started on a freight train between White and African-American teenage hobos. A sheriff's posse in Paint Rock, Alabama was given orders to search for and "capture every Negro on the train". The posse also questioned Ruby Bates and Victoria Price (notorious prostitutes), who claimed they had been raped (to avoid prostitution charges) by the nine teenagers. The falsely accused boys were quickly arrested for rape. The court case held in Scottsboro, Alabama would become one of the most significant legal battles of the twentieth century...leading to intense sectional conflict and international protest...two Supreme Court decisions (effective counsel law and integrated juries)...and the rise of the modern Civil Rights Movement.

Langston Hughes, one of my favorite (and very radical) poets of the Harlem Renaissance spent the fall of 1931 writing (a short play and four poems) about the Scottsboro case and even visited Kilby Prison in Montgomery, Alabama where eight of the nine boys were being held. The collection was published in 1932, along with “Scottsboro” illustrations by Prentiss Taylor.

In the four poems...Justice...The Town of Scottsboro...Christ in Alabama...and Scottsboro...Hughes uses simple prose to illicit very controversial, complex, and intense emotions. The most controversial poem of the four, Christ in Alabama was taken out of print between 1959 and 1967 due to "Red Scare" attacks on Hughes during the Cold War Era. In depth analysis here...

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/hughes/christ.htm

Here are the two "least controversial" Scottsboro poems...I hope you take time to analyze these "simple" poems.

Justice

That Justice is a blind goddess

Is a thing to which we black are wise.

Her bandage hides two festering sores

That once perhaps were eyes.

 

 

The Town of Scottsboro
Scottsboro's just a little place:
No shame is writ across its face-
Its courts too weak to stand against a mob,
Its people's heart, too small to hold a sob.