The Scottsboro Boys

They were boys—the youngest, thirteen; the oldest, nineteen—hoboing on a freight train through Tennessee in 1931. But when two women in a group of white hoboes who started a fight with the nine African Americans boys accused them all of rape, their subsequent arrest and trials in Scottsboro, Alabama resulted in one of the most infamous miscarriages of American justice. Two landmark Supreme Court decisions from the seven-year legal odyssey established the universal right to adequate legal counsel and said jurors could no longer be dismissed from trials due to their race. But eighty-two years would pass before the last of nine innocents were pardoned, in 2013. Three years before that, in one of their last collaborations, longtime Broadway legends John Kander and Fred Ebb sharpened the point of their musical theater adaptation by placing a tale of atrocity in an equally scandalous frame, as a old-time minstrel show. Buckle up; it’s going to be intense. Gerry McIntyre directs the Theatre Raleigh production.