Scottsboro - My Journey to Alabama

The sign above the platform at Scottsboro Railroad Station

This weekend sees Kander and Ebb's The Scottsboro Boys come to the sold-out end of its acclaimed West End run, a troubling yet brilliant show that first stunned London back in December 2013 at the Young Vic. I knew nothing of this chapter of American history before seeing Susan Stroman's production, but I was to leave the Young Vic stunned by the musical's technical and stylish genius and deeply moved by its tragic tale.

My journey to Scottsboro actually began in autumn last year. The show was about to transfer to the West End's Garrick Theatre and I had been invited to interview flown-over Broadway star James T. Lane, together with whirlwind New York impresario Catherine Schreiber who (along with Paula Marie Black and the Young Vic) was producing. As our conversation ended and the microphone was switched off, a chance remark led me to mention to Catherine that I had an impending business trip to visit clients across the USA. As I outlined my intinerary, Schreiber commented that one of the towns on my route was barely an hour's drive from Scottsboro and how I must visit the museum that marks the Scottsboro Boys' story. She made the necessary introductions and very soon I was in touch with the museum's founder and director, Shelia Washington.  

So it was that one overcast October morning last year I found myself deep in America's Deep South, driving along Alabama's stretch of the Lee Highway and heading for Scottsboro. My car's GPS (sat-nav) suggested that I detour from the fast route and follow the last ten miles into town along an old country lane that hugged the tracks of the Southern Railroad line. The show’s New York cast recording (a London recording is to be released soon) was playing in the car and as trees, track and churches sped by, the emotional power of heading towards that humble Southern town, now stained with one of the last century's most terrible miscarriages of justice, became quite overpowering. I could not have guessed that I was shortly to experience one of the most humbling and inspirational days of my life. 

Writing in The Guardian two years ago, Ed Pilkington succinctly describes the events that led to the arrest of the Scottsboro Boys.

Paradoxically, the Scottsboro Nine had nothing to do with Scottsboro. On the night of 25 March 1931 the boys – the youngest 12, the oldest 19 – were hoboing on a freight train heading west to Memphis, Tennessee, when some of them got into a fight with a group of white youths. The white boys jumped off the train as it passed through the Scottsboro area and complained to the local sheriff that they had been attacked and with that one dubious claim Southern justice cranked into motion. 

The view from Scottsboro platform. The Boys' train came from this direction

By the time the train reached the next stop a posse of armed local white men had formed and the group went from carriage to carriage, arresting all the blacks they could find. As they were searching the train, they also came across two white women, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates.

The view from Scottsboro platform. The Boys' train headed towards this direction

It's hard from the distance of 80 years to appreciate fully what it meant for white women to be found even in the vicinity of black men in 1931. Any physical contact, however remote, was taboo.

That taboo probably explains why one of the women, Price, invented the story that she and Bates had been gang raped – it was a ruse to avoid any risk of being jailed overnight herself. For the black young men accused of raping the two white woman, the risk was of a different magnitude. In the 1930s Deep South it meant only one thing: death. As the Arkansas poet John Gould Fletcher put it, if a white woman swears that a black man even tried to rape her, "we see to it that the Negro is executed".

When the nine terrified boys were taken to the nearest town, Scottsboro and put in the local jail, there was only one question that needed settling: would they be executed judicially or at the end of a rope slung from the nearest tree. There were 13 lynchings in the US in 1931 and the nine came very close to dramatically inflating that figure – the sheriff had to call in the National Guard to hold back a large and angry mob.

Although Scottsboro is the seat of surrounding Jackson County, its town square is surprisingly quiet. There is a tiny shopping plaza that includes a US Marines recruiting centre, whilst around the corner is the proudly emblazoned Scottsboro Gun & Pawn store. By American standards it’s a very small city, lacking even a town centre McDonalds. On realising that I had ventured out without a notepad, the writer's essential tool, I looked around the square to purchase a replacement. There was neither a stationers nor a supermarket to hand but I did spot a homely looking gifts and trinkets store. Wandering in, the charming owner and a true Alabama Lady for sure, helped me out by selling me a blank notepad from her stock of admin supplies. I was profoundly grateful and we struck up a brief conversation for a visiting Englishman turns out to be a rare event in Scottsboro. It was when this delightful shopkeeper asked me why I was in town and I explained that I was there to meet Shelia Washington at the museum, that the hitherto famously warm Southern hospitality turned icy.

Lee Highway, Jackson County ..... there's a pattern emerging in these names. Those men were the Confederate heroes of the American Civil War, who took the South’s battles to the North and ultimately lost. And while time and (some) legislation has moved on, many troubling old attitudes still straddle the Mason Dixon Line. Where most local authorities provide some funding to museums or places of culture within their jurisdiction, Washington was to tell me that the Scottsboro city fathers offer her museum no cash whatsoever. Not one dollar. Her revelation chilled me, for whilst the Jim Crow days may be gone, Scottsboro still remains a town struggling with its identity.

The Scottsboro Boys Museum

The museum is sat next to the eponymous railroad line and as I parked my car, what seemed like a never-ending freight train was rolling by. Travelling slow, it blew its beautiful mournful two-tone horn, an iconic sound that so defines an American train. Aside from the fact that trains fascinate me, I was transfixed. I stood, watched and listened before knocking on the museum door.

Created in a now de-consecrated church and where the former chapel is still filled with pews, it was in this tiny hall in April 2013 that Alabama's Governor Bentley signed the State’s Senate Bill and House Resolution that formally pardoned and exonerated the Scottsboro Boys. If Schreiber is a powerhouse of theatre-producing, then Washington is a beacon to those who campaign for racial equality. She drove the campaign that led to the Scottsboro Boys' exoneration and amongst the good people of the South, she is a hero. 

Aside from an unexpected flurry of media interest, where two local newspapers and a TV news station had turned out to cover my visit, (for media link see below) I was touched that not only had Washington opened the museum specially for me (it usually opens twice a month), but that most of its Board of Trustees had turned out to meet with me too. I met with Caroline Lynch, the daughter of the now long deceased Dr Marvin Lynch and one of the two doctors who examined the women on the night of the alleged rapes, finding no evidence of sexual assault. The doctor truthfully reported his findings at the time, but they were ignored by the Scottsboro prosecutors as an inconvenient truth. It was not until some years later, that the medic felt safe enough to re-assert his clinical evidence.

Caroline Lynch

It is important to remember that amidst the evil turmoil that surrounded the Scottsboro Boys' wrongful arrest, there were acts of principled bravery from a number of white people. Most heroic perhaps was Scottsboro's Sheriff Matt Wann who supervised the shepherding of the boys, away from the baying mob, to the comparative safety of the town's jail on the night of the arrests. I met with Scottsboro citizen Clyde Broadway, who told of his uncle being tasked by Sheriff Wann to "go buy a skein of rope" to help corral the boys and keep them huddled together away from the crowds. One year later, Wann was to be shot dead on duty.

Clyde Broadway

But what of Shelia Washington and what drives this remarkable woman? Pilkington writes: 

Young Shelia Washington had never heard a single word of the story of the "Scottsboro Boys", as they were then called, despite having been born and brought up in the small town where such visceral history had been made. When her father found her reading the memoir he snatched the volume from her hands and ordered her never to open it again. "He said he didn't want me to know the harmful things that were contained inside," she says.

Shelia Washington

It is Washington's understated strength and conviction that is so profoundly humbling. She told me of her brother who had been brutally murdered in jail whilst serving his sentence. His killers had never been formally identified, let alone brought to justice and Washington is convinced that the murder was racially motivated. She believes she knows the identity of his killers too, but resignedly accepts that there is little she can do to achieve justice for her dead brother. It has been the harnessing of her rage at the injustice meted out to her brother that sparked her to champion the cause of the Scottsboro Boys. Even as I write this, Washington’s next mission is to locate and to mark the burial places of each of the nine men. Her commitment is unshakeable.

Against a backdrop of endemic racism, The Scottsboro Boys’ trials were to prove a focal point for the nation at that time, though as 87 year-old composer John Kander was to tell me recently:

I remembered that when I was just learning to read I would see on the newspaper, pretty much daily in those early reading days, something about The Scottsboro Boys. I didn't know what that was or who they were, but they were always mentioned, they were always called that title. As I began to be able to read and understand more, it seemed to me that they were always spoken of as a group. Then they disappeared altogether.

Whilst the story might have disappeared from the national headlines, it had already cemented a foundation for the emergent American civil rights movement. Rosa Parks, one of the key civil rights figures in the 1950s was a steadfast campaigner for the Scottsboro Boys and she in turn was to inspire the support of Martin Luther King. 

Recent events in the USA and elsewhere in the world tell us that the essential cause of the Scottsboro Boys is a fight that still goes on, with America in particular still having deep issues to address. Speaking in the Scottsboro Boys Museum on the day of Governor Bentley’s pardon, Alabama’s Representative Laura Hall said: 

Hopefully, our great State of Alabama can be Alabama the Beautiful, where justice is dispensed equally and fairly without regard to race, sex, social class or religious belief.

Hall’s is a noble hope, sincerely to be commended, but there is much to be done to realise it. It is to the credit of Scottsboro’s Shelia Washington however, that such momentous progress has already been achieved.


Media Links:

Click here to visit the website of The Scottsboro Boys Museum

John Kander Talks about The Scottsboro Boys

Monday January 19th marks Martin Luther King Day 2015.

There is a moment towards the end of The Scottsboro Boys musical when a black woman is told to move to the the back of a segregated bus and she refuses. That woman was Rosa Parks and her subsequent arrest led to a boycott of the buses in her city of Montgomery, Alabama. King's role in the bus boycott was to transform him into a national figure and become the best-known spokesman of America's growing civil rights movement.

John Kander, together with the late Fred Ebb, in creating the legendary partnership of Kander and Ebb had already composed some of the greatest shows of the 20th century, including Cabaret and Chicago before going on to write The Scottsboro Boys.

To coincide with Martin Luther King Day, I interviewed John Kander about the show, and in a conversation that ranged from the injustices of prejudice around the world, through to the development of a musical with Fred Ebb and Susan Stroman, the conversation was fascinating. Read on....

John Kander

JB: What made you want to write a musical about the story of The Scottsboro Boys? 

JK: The first thing that happened really was that Stro (Susan Stroman – the show’s director and choreographer) and Fred (Ebb) and Tommy (David Thompson, who wrote the show’s book) and I loved working together. That's really the first thing. 

We were looking for a subject and we had spent some time dealing with the '30s as a period which to explore and as I recall, we thought let's keep looking there and see what's interesting to us.

I can't be very accurate about how the subject came to us. Certainly we were looking at cases and trials among a lot of other things as a possible subject. 

Once we stumbled onto Scottsboro, we were immediately intrigued by it, in great part because nobody with the exception of me probably, remembered it at all and I remembered it because I'm so bloody old. (Kander is 87)

I remembered that when I was just learning to read I would see on the newspaper, pretty much daily in those early reading days, something about The Scottsboro Boys. I didn't know what that was or who they were, but they were always mentioned, they were always called that title. As I began to be able to read and understand more, it seemed to me that they were always spoken of as a group. Then they disappeared altogether.

When we stumbled on this topic we were immediately, in the first place just as humans, intrigued by this story and horrified by it.

I think the thing particularly, looking back on it, was to think that these guys actually disappeared. There were nine lives that were just erased, if you will.Then we began to try and figure out how we might tell the story. 

My feeling, and I think my co-workers will agree, is that when we stumbled on the idea of the minstrel show it suddenly solved any number of problems. First of all the minstrel show, which was the most popular form of entertainment in the country for I think well over 100 years and even had its reflection in England too, with The Black and White Minstrel Show

JB: Yes. That show was broadcast on the BBC until 1978 and achieved very high ratings.  

JK: And the minstrel genre was terribly, terribly popular in the USA too. Nobody thought anything about it. That's what's amazing. I don't think any of us really thought about the real implications of it. Not only was it made up of white people in black face (black make up), but if you had black performers, they also had to wear black face too.

Aside from the racist conversations that come with the minstrel show, its structural form was such that there is a semi-circle of entertainers and in the middle is sat a white man, the Interlocutor, who we looked on as a kind of benign “plantation owner” type.

The Interlocutor calls on people to tell stories or tell jokes or do a dance or carry out some long sort of narrative and as you may recall having seen the show, every once in a while the Interlocutor will say, "Mr. Bones, tell us a joke." Or "You boys sing that song about home that I love so much." So that flexibility meant that we could jump around in the story and weren’t too bound by narrative. In my opinion, once we stumbled on the minstrel show, that was the key to The Scottsboro Boys musical. 

One of the other things about the minstrel show, which none of us really considered as we were growing up, was that it was a show populated by white men pretending to be black and playing for a white audience. They also sang songs written by white men as if they were black men longing for the days of the old plantation.

Some of the most popular songs that ever happened in our country, the Stephen Foster songs like Old  Black Joe or Swanee River, they all are very lyrical, nostalgic songs about “how I wish I was back on the old plantation with good ole Massa”. 

It's interesting, and I think this is so true in a lot more areas, that you can get used to that prejudice and you no longer think about what these things really mean. They just become kind of entertaining cliches.

JB: The prejudice becomes normalized and conditioned…

JK: Right, they did this in vaudeville for years and if you leave the black situation by itself, the stingy Jew, the drunk Irishman, those stereotypes are very entertaining to a certain extent and people made their careers out of exploiting them and being funny with them, but then in some areas they become lethal.

When you look at the cartoons in the early days of Nazi Germany, the big-nosed, conniving Jew who is out to eat children and hoard all the money. Those things go from entertainment into real powerful propaganda.

It happens without us even realizing it.

JB: I want to talk more about the Interlocutor and what Julian Glover does with that role in London.

JK: Yes, he's wonderful.

Colman Domingo (Mr Bones), Julian Glover, Forrest McClendon (Mr Tambo)

JB: It strikes me as such a complicated role. The Interlocutor’s racism is ingrained, it's what he's grown up with. His is such a complicated character and I think Julian gives it an amazing degree of depth.

JK: I quite agree. I think he's spot on with it and the thing is about the Interlocutor, is that he's a racist sort of by definition but he really, truly believes that black people are just not as smart as white people and it's up to the white folks to take care of them. He believes that that's what he does. He believes that they have a place in the world, but they are not equal to white folk, in a kind of paternalistic way.

It's the romanticized idea of “good ole Massa” on the plantation, but he is not a Klu Klux Klansman.  somebody who would go out and shoot people or lynch them.

Julian Glover is perfect and he found just the right tone, so that at the end when the people that he's working with wipe off their blackface makeup and don't want to do the cakewalk anymore, he's upset that he's shocked and uncomprehending. 

JB: My next question is about the role of The Woman in The Scottsboro Boys. When I first saw the show, the woman was an enigma to me throughout, until the Rosa Park connection is made at the end. Seeing the show again and watching her onstage throughout, one can really observe that she symbolizes what The Scottsboro Boys did to the civil rights cause in the United States. 

Whose idea was it, as you were creating the show, to have the woman onstage throughout?

JK: I can be very specific about that. Tommy and Stro and I were having lunch at Stro's house, which is something we like to do anyway and we were sitting around the table and in my memory it was Stro who brought up the idea of having an observer and originally that observer was a little girl.

Then we did variations on that and we talked about maybe having a little girl who then gets older and older as time goes on and is a woman at the end of it. And then we learned that Rosa Parks was in fact involved with the Scottsboro Boys. That little moment in the last third of the show, where somebody brings them a cake, that was her, that really happened.

So we immediately I think sort of grabbed onto the idea that yes she is Rosa Parks but she is also more than that, in other words she is a real person, but she is a symbolic person as well.

I can even remember the sandwiches we ate as we planned that part of the show. We got our choice of tuna fish sandwiches or peanut butter and jelly, which I love. It was a very nice afternoon.

JB: On a more general level about your career, what was it that drew you and Fred to such interesting, difficult chapters of history to write shows about?

JK: I think your first adjective was the answer. What drew us to such “interesting” stories. The pieces that we've written which seem to be dealing with unlikely musical subjects, which are actually what make you want to write. 

I can't be I think more specific than that, but you know what's really hard to write? Boy meets girl, then they have an argument and they separate and then they come back together again. That's really hard, but if you're writing material about the beginnings of Nazism or the lack of justice in fascist South American prisons or racial problems, or killing people, murder in Chicago, those stories, those are rich pieces of material.

It's much easier to write that. you become so engaged emotionally that your passion for writing the piece can maintain itself right straight up to opening night.

JB: John Kander, thank you very much for your time today.

JK: It has been my pleasure.

The Scottsboro Boys continues at the Garrick Theatre until 21st February 2015.

Other reading:

My interview with Catherine Schreiber, producer and James T Lane, cast member of the Garrick production.

My 2014 review of the Garrick production

My 2013 review of the Young Vic production