“The South Had to Reap what She Sowed”—Scottsboro and the Critique of Motherhood

Abstract

Beginning in 1931, the case of nine Black “boys” arrested in Scottsboro, Alabama, charged with raping two White girls on a train to Memphis not only caught the attention of the Communist Party of the United States as well as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, but sparked campaigns of international solidarity around the globe. The mothers of the nine defendants played a central role in the campaigns to free the “Scottsboro Boys” from jail and the electric chair; they traveled, spoke at protest marches, voiced their positions in articles and appeals, and even on the stand. Taking the accounts of the “Scottsboro Mothers” seriously, this article goes beyond interpretations that have reduced their arguments to ahistorical appeals to universal motherhood. Aspects such as political subjectivity, matters of exploitation and expropriation, and questions of kinship in relation to questions of freedom are at the center of my argument. As such, the history of the Scottsboro Mothers is situated at the intersection of Black feminist theory, the meaning of the mother and motherhood in early twentieth-century communist thought, as well as current theoretical approaches to racial capitalism. Listening to the critique of the Scottsboro Mothers defies positioning them either in a reformist or a radical tradition.