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Race & Scottsboro Boys
Race & Scottsboro Boys
Race & Scottsboro Boys
The Scottsboro Boys, about the nine young men who were
falsely accused and sentenced to death for raping two white
women in 1931, provides a screen upon which our
unresolved racism is uncomfortably projected. It sticks its
finger into the still-open wound that is race in this country,
forcing the audience to watch the boys dance and sing in a
minstrel format as they struggle to find their true voice.
The show flips the traditional minstrel show on its head,
using it to humanize, rather than caricaturize, the
participants. In the opening moments of the play, Haywood
Patterson, the eldest Scottsboro boy, asks, “Can we tell it
like it really happened? … This time, can we tell the truth?”
And by the final scene of the play, the blackface is gone. The
minstrel show is over. And we see real men telling a real
story of injustice and racism.
“The first time we ever did a reading of the show was the day
after Obama was elected, that Wednesday morning, sitting
with a group of black men in a rehearsal studio, reading the
script,” the show’s writer, David Thompson, told me recently.
“And for a second there, it was as if there had been a
seismic shift in the world. We thought: ‘Is this piece relevant
anymore? Have we discovered that we’re on the other side
of the conversation?’ … We realized very quickly that, no,
what we’re having now is a very veiled discussion. We’re
using new words to discuss racism. We’re screaming ‘You
lie!’ on the floor of the Senate to a black president, because
somehow that seems appropriate.
Afterward, there was a Q&A with the actors. One kid in the
balcony shouted, “If you were in a situation where you had
the ability to get out of … to get parole … if you just lied,
would you do it?” Somebody else asked, “What was it like to
put on blackface for the first time? And what’s it feel like to
take it off?” Another kid asked, “Now that you’ve been in the
show, what is your opinion about the death penalty?”
The kids got the play at the deepest level, even when the
adults outside did not. They were prepared to ask the tough
questions we all too often shy away from. Part of our
collective immigrant heritage—whether Irish, Italian,
Chinese, Mexican, or Africans brought here as slaves—is to
leave our children a better world than the one we endured.
Are we really prepared to leave them, black and white
children both, a legacy that perpetuates a fundamental
fiction about race in America?
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