Scottsboro Limited, from the portfolio Scottsboro
One Book One Northwestern, 2020–21
This artwork was selected in response to themes in Northwestern’s community-wide reading of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014) by Bryan Stevenson.
In Scottsboro, Alabama in 1931, nine Black boys and men, ranging in age from 13 to 19 years old, were falsely accused of raping two white women on a train. The case became a symbol of the appalling miscarriage of justice and touches on such themes in Just Mercy as the failures of the juvenile justice system and harsh and unjust sentencing of African Americans generally and especially in the South. In the first trial, eight were quickly convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to the death penalty. The ninth defendant, 13-year-old Leroy (Roy) Wright, was sentenced to life in prison.
The Scottsboro case became internationally infamous as an example of the systemic and deeply embedded racism of the U.S. court system. The lithograph was created as part of a series to illustrate a play and poems about the case by writer Langston Hughes, and was published in this booklet with proceeds from sales donated to the defense. One of four images in the booklet, it shows the nine defendants huddled closely atop a train. With arms raised the image evokes martyrdom, reinforced in the cross-like forms of the telephone poles. The facts surrounding the Scottsboro case and trial represent a tragic historic precedent for Walter McMillian, the young defendants discussed in Just Mercy, and so many other wrongly accused African American people in prison.
