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December
‘Can We Tell It Like It Really
Happened?’: On Race and ‘The Scottsboro
Boys’
Facing protests, Broadway production The Scottsboro
Boys will close this Sunday. Tom Matlack argues
that the show was misunderstood.
When I was 8, while my classmates were learning
their multiplication tables, I was thrown into the
back of a paddy wagon and dragged into court. My
dad—a Quaker activist—and I had committed
civil disobedience on a crisp fall day in Western
Massachusetts.
As a little boy who just needed to go to the
bathroom, I tried, futilely, to take a leak into a
single, seatless toilet in front of a cell full of
men. Those few hours behind bars scared me. I
didn’t want to go back. While many others who
had run-ins with the law at such a tender age went
on to serve time, I never stepped foot in prison
again as a young man.
But a quarter-century after my childhood arrest,
I did go back to jail repeatedly, this time as a
visitor. I went to South Bay House of Corrections
in Boston, a maximum-security prison in
Connecticut, and ultimately, Sing Sing. Sitting
with a room full of lifers, deep in the bowels of
that stone structure “up the river,” two
things struck me: the inmates were nearly all
black, and they looked so young. When they went
around the room to introduce themselves, it brought
tears to my eyes to hear that even the
youngest-looking boys had been inside for more than
a decade.
Nationally, unemployment among black men ages
16–24 stands at 35 percent. Sixty-five percent
of black boys grow up in fatherless homes. Of the
prison population of 2,424,279 inmates, 44
percent—more than a million—are black;
there are 919,000 black men enrolled in college. If
current trends continue, one in three black male
babies born today will end up in prison.
We Americans ignore the obvious because it is
far too uncomfortable to consider: Martin Luther
King’s dream is still far from being
realized.
Into this myth of racial progress enters The
Scottsboro Boys, a Broadway production that debuted
on October 31 at the Lyceum Theater. (Full
disclosure: I helped finance the play, in honor of
my parents who travelled to Mississippi in the
Freedom Summer of 1964, and to honor the
African-American inmates with whom I have spent
time in ancient human cages like Sing Sing.)
The Scottsboro Boys, about the nine young men
who were falsely accused and sentenced to death for
raping two white women in 1931, provides a screen
upon which our unresolved racism is uncomfortably
projected. It sticks its finger into the still-open
wound that is race in this country, forcing the
audience to watch the boys dance and sing in a
minstrel format as they struggle to find their true
voice.
The show flips the traditional minstrel show on
its head, using it to humanize, rather than
caricaturize, the participants. In the opening
moments of the play, Haywood Patterson, the eldest
Scottsboro boy, asks, “Can we tell it like it
really happened? … This time, can we tell the
truth?” And by the final scene of the play,
the blackface is gone. The minstrel show is over.
And we see real men telling a real story of
injustice and racism.
Watching The Scottsboro Boys, I was made
painfully aware of my own racism. I judge people by
their skin color, their religion, their sexual
orientation. The fact is, we all do; it
doesn’t make us bad people—it makes us
human. But if we are ever going to get anywhere on
the topic of race, we have to stop sugarcoating the
discourse. We can’t let the election of a
black president obscure the fact that we’re
still locking up all the black men in this
country.
“The first time we ever did a reading of
the show was the day after Obama was elected, that
Wednesday morning, sitting with a group of black
men in a rehearsal studio, reading the
script,” the show’s writer, David
Thompson, told me recently. “And for a second
there, it was as if there had been a seismic shift
in the world. We thought: ‘Is this piece
relevant anymore? Have we discovered that
we’re on the other side of the
conversation?’ … We realized very quickly
that, no, what we’re having now is a very
veiled discussion. We’re using new words to
discuss racism. We’re screaming ‘You
lie!’ on the floor of the Senate to a black
president, because somehow that seems
appropriate.
“That’s why the minstrel show combines
that ability to have that strange laugh that you
would have at the expense of others,” Thompson
continued. “In South Park, when you’re
watching something that’s just so politically
incorrect, you still laugh, and then you think,
‘Well, did I really laugh at that?’
Because it demands that you question
something.”
A group in New York calling itself the Freedom
Party—a bastardization of the Freedom
Democratic Party, for which my parents risked their
lives to help blacks get the right to vote in
1964—launched a much-publicized protest
against The Scottsboro Boys, picketing the theater
and calling upon patrons to boycott. The protests
certainly contributed to its demise—it will
close on Sunday, December 12.
None of the protestors had seen the play. The
group’s leader, Charles Barron, a one-time
gubernatorial candidate, organized the protests to
raise his own personal profile, while attacking
artists who are asking tough questions about racial
injustice—the same racial injustice that the
Freedom Party claims to be fighting.
My question to the protestors is the one I ask
you: When are you going to stop the minstrel show
that is race in America, wipe away the blackface,
and start telling the truth, no matter how
uncomfortable that might be? It will always be
easier to lie when the system reinforces myth.
While the play was being protested outside, the
Theater Development Fund bought out two
performances for high-school students, most of them
black and who had never seen a live theater
production. The kids were leaning forward in their
seats, cell phones off, fully engaged in the story.
“They were laughing, they were screaming, they
were gasping, they were laughing louder than
I’d ever heard anybody laugh,” Thompson
recalled. “And they were more live than
I’ve ever heard an audience, especially toward
the end.”
Afterward, there was a Q&A with the actors.
One kid in the balcony shouted, “If you were
in a situation where you had the ability to get out
of … to get parole … if you just lied,
would you do it?” Somebody else asked,
“What was it like to put on blackface for the
first time? And what’s it feel like to take it
off?” Another kid asked, “Now that
you’ve been in the show, what is your opinion
about the death penalty?”
The kids got the play at the deepest level, even
when the adults outside did not. They were prepared
to ask the tough questions we all too often shy
away from. Part of our collective immigrant
heritage—whether Irish, Italian, Chinese,
Mexican, or Africans brought here as slaves—is
to leave our children a better world than the one
we endured. Are we really prepared to leave them,
black and white children both, a legacy that
perpetuates a fundamental fiction about race in
America?
Read Tom Matlack’s full
conversation with The Scottsboro Boys
writer David Thompson.
©2011, Tom
Matlack
* * *
While all complain of our ignorance and
error,
everyone exempts himself. - John Glanville
Tom Matlack,
"I am a sucker for real-life heroes, particularly
the ones that get overlooked. My profile work grew
from my first published piece, THE RACE, which
describes my own life altering experience in an
athletic event barely worthy of the local paper.
Coaches and athletes in the sport of rowing were my
initial focus before expanding to mainstream sports
like professional basketball. Music, film, and
television have proven fertile ground for heroic
journeys of a different, but related, kind.
Finally, I have continued to write bits and pieces
of my own story in an attempt to inspire and
enlighten."
Thomas Matlack was Chief
Financial Officer of The Providence Journal until
1997. He was the lead investor in Art Technology
Group, which reached $5 billion in market
capitalization in 2001. He founded and ran his own
venture firm, started companies like American
Profile (sold to Disney for $260 million) and
Telephia (sold to Neilson for $560 million), before
turning to writing. His work has appeared in
Rowing News, Boston Common, Boston
Magazine, Boston Globe Magazine and
Newspaper, Wesleyan, Yale,
Tango, and Pop Matters.
In 2008, Matlack founded
www.TheGoodManProject.org,
with his venture capital partner James Houghton. He
has appeared on national and local television and
radio as well as print across the country. The fall
of 2009, Matlack led a non-conventional book tour
for The
Good Men Project that
started inside Sing Sing and ended in Hollywood
with a screening of THE GOOD MEN PROJECT
documentary film followed by a panel discussion
including Matt Weiner and Shepard
Fairey.
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