The Scottsboro Book
Cover, Scottsboro–A Story in Block Cuts, 1932
Illustrated and written by Lin Shi Khan and Ralph Austin (American, b. 1912)
USA
Ink and pencil on brown craft paper
Credit: The Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach,
Florida, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection
83.3.3395
On March 25, 1931, nine young African American boys who had hopped a train in an attempt to find employment in Birmingham, Alabama were arrested after a fight with some white youths doing the same. Two white girls who had also been caught illegally "riding the rails" claimed that they had been raped, in order to avoid prosecution as vagrants or prostitutes. The white hobo brawlers were released, but the nine black youths were taken to Scottsboro, Alabama, tried without counsel, convicted of the alleged crime, and all but the youngest sentenced to death. At this point, the International Labor Defense, the legal arm of the American Communist Party, intervened on their behalf, demanding a new trial, and organizing world-wide protests on behalf of "Negro Rights." The rare manuscript presented here was produced with an aim towards broadcasting the cause of the "Scottsboro boys" and promoting the Party's agenda of a world proletarian revolution.
The Wolfsonian–FIU Library is proud to present the original manuscript version of Scottsboro: a story in linoleum cuts, online and in its entirety. Our copy is an extraordinarily rare piece—with only one other copy of this work having been found to date (a revised version prepared for publication, and printed in Seattle in 1935, though apparently never distributed). A hardcover edition of the latter version has been published by the New York University Press in 2002, and is now being made available as an e-book.
Although the majority of the linocut plates are identical, the deletions and additions and the differences between the text of our handwritten manuscript copy and that of the more polished printed version are both interesting and significant. The Wolfsonian copy contains illustrated half-title and title page apparently deleted from the finished product. The slavery experience is treated consistently in both versions, although the Seattle version includes an additional illustration that recognizes African American agency in toppling the peculiar institution, with an aim at inspiring another revolution against the capitalist state. This plate, not found in our original manuscript version, depicts a pitchfork-wielding slave breaking free of his chains, and the caption "The Negro slaves soon rose in rebellion." Both the Wolfsonian and Seattle versions also focus on the post-Civil War Ku Klux Klan campaign of terror, and emphasize the shared misery of the Great Depression that forced both black and white sharecroppers into interracial Unions or else onto the rails in search of work.
The most significant difference between the Wolfsonian's manuscript version and the more polished Seattle version is in the opposite treatment of Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, the "victims" of the alleged rape. In the Wolfsonian's manuscript, both women are graphically depicted in several plates as prostitutes who appear to countenance the sexual advances of the sheriffs, capitalists, and preachers coercing their tainted testimony. (See Plates, 22, 26, 27). None of these sexually-charged plates appear in the more polished, ready-to-publish version of the book, and Bates and Price are instead depicted as rigorously defending themselves from the lascivious advances of the local sheriff in a plate not appearing in our earlier edition. This editorial shift doubtlessly stemmed from the failed first defense of the Scottsboro boys by a prominent New York criminal lawyer, Samuel Leibowitz, hired by the I.L.D. Although Leibowitz very successfully demonstrated in court that the two girls had been coerced into inventing the rape story, his characterization of them as women of "easy virtue" was considered an affront to the honor of Southern women, and so offended the all white male jury that they rendered a guilty verdict against the boys. As a result, those in charge of editing the manuscript probably decided to underplay the sensitive gender issue, and instead focus more squarely on the problem of Southern racism, adding another two new plates dealing with this theme.
One final editorial change ought also to be recognized. In the original manuscript version, a plate ridiculing the NAACP is included that does not appear in the subsequent Seattle edition. It was only after Communist organizers from the I.L.D. visited the Scottsboro defendants in jail and launched a world-wide campaign on their behalf that the NAACP took notice of the case and also attempted to secure the boys a new trial. The rivalry between the two organizations is reflected in the handwritten text of the Wolfsonian manuscript, which reads: "The white boss uses the Negro boss organization the National Association for Advancement of the Colored People to stop the Negro people from uniting with the white workers." The text is graphically illustrated with a unique plate depicting a capitalist "fat cat" puppet-master (complete with top hat) standing behind and manipulating and obese, derby-sporting NAACP leader dressed in a business suit, who stands with an outstretched arm putting a halt to three African American protesters in working clothes. Here again, the omission of this text and plate in the Seattle version is indicative of the changing strategy of the I.L.D. when in 1935 the Communist Party recognized the need to build a "Popular Front" consensus among liberal and radical groups against the common enemy of fascism and racism.
Introduction
by Francis Xavier Luca;
Images scanned by Lauren Grover;
Web interface designed by Sheila Thomson;
© The Wolfsonian–Florida International University. All rights reserved.
