The Meaning of It All

The Scottsboro Boys were huge. The Communist Party became involved and did the best it could for them. So when the story was put to a musical that followed the format of a minstrel some people got angry enough to protest. While I personally do not mind protest at all, I prefer it to the opposite, where people just sit at home, this has to be explored a little deeper. The one line that stuck out to me had two of the characters confirm that they were going to tell the “real story,” how it really happened.

To tell, in my opinion, the real story, one needs a book. But as far as the medium allows, the musical did a very good job of outlining the story, and of agitating, of showing the society as it was (and as it continues to be?). This is the final unanswered question I have for art. Is it simply art for art’s sake? Make pretty so it is pretty? Or do we want something more, do we want art to shine a somewhat uncomfortable to downright disturbing light on the modern world? Do we want to see or do we want to be entertained?

By those standards Scottsboro Boys does very well. The performance demonstrated that the trial was a joke, which it basically was in reality; there was no real evidence. Sometimes I found myself laughing and realizing exactly how realistic it was, that people could be treated so horribly and with so little regard for anything like justice. They were, it would not be too much to say, guilty from the very start in the minds of those who were supposed to give them justice.

There is, however, an entirely different handling of this story, the one of Langston Hughes. In his play he had the Scottsboro Boys realize the essential tenants of Marxist thought, reject religion, and rise up and unite with the white members of the Communist Party before the play is over. Should art then tell us also not only what was but what ought to have been?