The Scottsboro Boys

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The Scottsboro Boys The story of the ten African-American boys on a train bound for Alabama, took America by storm in the early 1930’s. The infamous crime of the ‘Scottsboro Boys’, which took almost two decades to work its way through the court system, remains one of the most examined cases in the legal history of the United States of America. The events changed the judicial system in several ways but most significantly by opening up the court systems to African-American jurors. With the case being such a landmark in the history of America, the story found its way into many artistic adaptations. The story was turned into a musical by John Kander and Fred Ebb, famous for writing the song “New York, New York”, which opened on Broadway in 2010. The musical used the format of a classic minstrel show in order to tell the grotesque story of the ‘Scottsboro Boys’. The minstrel show format, which once was the main form of entertainment, is now deemed highly offensive but is it possible for the format to be used to demonstrate racist stories and be an effective form of story telling. The story of the ‘Scottsboro Boys’ has been studied and analyzed since it first the 1930’s. Douglas O. Linder, a legal professor at the University of Missouri, writes: “No crime in American history-- let alone a crime that never occurred-- produced as many trials, convictions, reversals, and retrials as did an alleged gang rape of two white girls by nine black teenagers on a Southern Railroad freight run on March 25, 1931. Over the course of the two decades that followed, the struggle for justice of the "Scottsboro Boys," as the black teens were called, made celebrities out of anonymities, launched and ended careers, wasted lives, produced heroes, opened southern juries to blacks, exacerbated sectional strife, and divided America's political left” (Linder). In March 1931, ten
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