The Scottsboro Boys

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In the early 1900s, racism was a looming issue in the South. African Americans were segregated from the Whites and were treated very differently. As a controversial issue in the past and still sometimes in the present, many people have been reluctant to bring up the issue in such a public way. Sure, there are textbooks that have sections we must read in history class that talk about the Jim Crow laws and segregation in the 1900s, but these little excerpts from the textbooks do not capture the issue of racism the way The Scottsboro Boys did. Some people find racism a difficult topic to talk about, but Susan Stroman’s directing made it both informative and enjoyable to viewers.

Ironically enough, for a time period when Whites dominated the South, there was only one White male, John Cullum in the cast who played the roles of interlocutor and the judge and governor of Alabama. The rest of the cast was all African American men and a single African American woman. The musical starts off with a minstrel show form of entertainment, with the bright, blinking lights and the characters dancing around ready to show the audience a good time. John Cullum reminds the viewers that this is a serious subject matter they are about to dive into and tells the audience to brace themselves for a journey back to the time when nine Black men were accused of raping two white women on a Southern Railway line going from Chattanooga to Memphis, Tennessee.

Throughout the play, Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo, played by Colman Domingo and Forrest McClendon, present a comic relief that is much needed considering the topic that is presented in the musical. With exaggerated accents and unnatural waddling around the stage, these characters present a type of irony for viewers; played by two African American men, these White characters are presented more as clowns than authoritative figures.

Ken Billington, the man behind the lighting design, did a fantastic job with manipulating different colored lights to parallel the mood of each scene. From the sunset shades during the “Commencing in Chattanooga” musical number, to the special bar filter to replicate the light coming in from barred windows in a jail cell, Billington made every scene credible and realistic. The use of simple every-day objects such as chairs and wooden planks were a clever addition to staying thrifty while encouraging the audience to expand their imagination to visualize the train cars, the jail cell, and the judge’s podium, just to name a few.

What I found most fascinating was the Lady that was in the background of the entire musical. From the start of the musical, we see a woman sitting down as the sounds of cars pass by and think she is a mere prop to what is to come later in the musical. However, she remains in every scene, silently watching and standing around, making expressions of shock, sadness, and sympathy for these nine men. Stroman did an excellent job tying her into the story at the very end with the diary written by one of the Scottsboro Boys. At the end of the musical, Stroman reveals to us that the Lady is actually Rosa Parks, inspired by the history written in that diary to stand up to the White bus driver who tells her to move to the back of the bus. The cast and the people responsible for making the musical such a success deserves high praise for both entertaining and informing the audience of the past in the 1930s.