Scottsboro Boys

Innocent men await their deaths in jail, tortured by their traditional white Southern guard, with absolutely no escape. In the meantime, let’s do the cakewalk! Scottsboro Boys was a musical unlike any I had ever seen. First of all, it was the first I have seen that could be placed in the historical genre and showed factual events of America after the Civil War. Of course, because it is a play and therefore must be entertaining, details were warped and embellished, however the main idea of the play was rooted in harsh reality.

Eight black men and one black boy who are simply trying to change their lives and escape to better things are all illegally riding a cargo train. Two young white women are riding this train as well, and, when the police find them, they decide that if they pretend these men raped them, the officer will completely forget about the fact that they should not have been on the train in the first place.

This lie, which seemed small and insignificant to the racist white women, got these nine men thrown into jail and ultimately destroyed their lives. How could these be turned into entertainment, one might ask. Through the addition of catchy songs and dances, with great caricatures of all the typical figures found in Southern tales such as these, such as the white minister who attempts to present himself as pure and holy yet is still just as racist as the other Southern white men. The caricatures were honestly the greatest I have ever seen. Never did I imagine that I would see an African American man playing a white Jewish lawyer so convincingly. I found myself often forgetting that there was only one Caucasian male in the show, who acted as the emcee and interrupted the story to bring humor into it when it seemed to becoming too realistic and therefore too dark.

Because of these inserts, one almost forgets that the play they are watching is ultimately a tragedy revealing the horrific effects of racism on the lives of nine innocent men. By inserting song and dance into the story, the true implications of the tale hit hard when, at the end of the play, the fates of all nine men are announced. During this scene, aside from a solitary monotone voice, there is absolute silence. When this occurs, the humor and entertainment from the musical vanishes completely, and I left the theater with a sad sense of realization about the horrific events found in American history.