Her most fresh and nuanced analysis of this issue occurs in her chapter on the
Scottsboro case, which would make an ideal reading assignment for an undergraduate class on the history of sexuality.
Both Scottsboro Limited and Harvest invoke Soviet Internationalism by adapting patterns from Soviet drama to represent the
Scottsboro case as a sign of entrenched racism in the US legal system, and to represent the vigilante response to San Joaquin cotton strikes as a fatal intersection of bias based on class and ethnicity.
Helen Marcy, an editor of the Communist Party's Southern Worker, described the pretrial hearings and "the National Guardsmen with drawn bayonets who stood between the 'surly and threatening' Tynch-hungry mob' and the 'terrified youngsters."' (14) Workers Theatre offered "group recitations on the
Scottsboro case" titled Scottsboro, available in German, Yiddish, and South Slavic.
In 1937, the state of Alabama dropped charges against four of the nine young black men accused of raping two white women in the ''
Scottsboro Case.''
(4) The
Scottsboro case was back in the news when the ILD.Supreme Court agreed to review the appeals by Clarence Norris andHeywood Patterson.
'The espousal and dramatization of the
Scottsboro case', two contemporary chroniclers of American radicalism noted in 1934, 'won them a considerable following, or at least a sympathetic hearing, among the Negroes, probably suffering more than any other group from the ravages of the depression'.
1937The US state of Alabama drops charges against five black men accused of raping two white women in the
Scottsboro case.
The ruling was appealed, and after a series of legal developments (mistrials, court reversals, retrials, convictions, and sentences for the accused), the
Scottsboro case became a quintessential cause celebre of Communists such as Frank Marshall Davis.
This very undercurrent subliminally reminds us of another kind of complicity at work: that of the political and societal forces which allowed the
Scottsboro case to occur in the first place.
While some congratulated Contempo and its writers for their courage in having stood against the "decaying throne of the Southern Bourbons," most were livid at UNC for inviting Hughes to speak on campus, and at Contempo for having published his criticism of the
Scottsboro case. (53) For example, during Hughes' campus presentation, local police officers congregated around Gerrard Hall as Hughes felt the tension of race that is "peculiar to the South." While no trouble erupted, many were inclined to run Hughes out of town, including one of the police bodyguards who remarked that: "Sure he should be run out!