Chapter 29 - Reading Scottsboro Limited in the Era of Black Lives Matter

Summary

The court trials of the Scottsboro Nine, young African Americans falsely accused of raping two young white women, galvanized a generation and helped precipitate Hughes’s leftward shift. In 1931, he published Scottsboro Limited: Four Poems and a Play in Verse, collecting an eponymous play and the poems “The Town of Scottsboro,” “Justice,” “Scottsboro,” and “Christ in Alabama” alongside images by Prentiss Taylor. Its themes – the lethal policing of a racially and economically vulnerable group – no less than the conflicts among different factions surrounding the trial, seem tailor-made to contemporary concerns. This chapter reads Hughes and Taylor together to shift the focus from the prospect of death to imprisonment itself as unjust. Then it asks what it means that its poems circulate as memes, absent their original context, to protest the seemingly endless instances of judicial and extrajudicial, state-sanctioned murder. If the question of a grievable death has taken on renewed urgency since 2014, Hughes’s Scottsboro writing urges readers to reconsider what we collectively recognize as death.