Effacing the Scottsboro Boys: Censorship as Discourse Ellen G. Landau, Case Western Reserve University

With his adaptation around 1968 of social critique expressed in a deliberately clumsy cartoonish style, many in the New York art world considered the career of acclaimed Abstract Expressionist Philip Guston to have taken a surprising turn. Unknown to most, however, by “introducing” Ku Klux Klan hoods into his iconography at this juncture, Guston was choosing to revisit his own personally complicated connections with political repression. Born in Montreal of Russian immigrant parents who fled Cossack pogroms, Guston moved with his family to Los Angeles in the 1920s, an era of social instability marked in Southern California by the visible rise of paranoid and exclusionary right-wing social behavior. Non-whites and Jews were routinely barred from acceptance and upward mobility; radically “other,” many (like Guston’s father, a suicide) could never assimilate nor shed an outsider’s sense of vulnerability. Standard accounts of Guston’s development have not analyzed in sufficient depth the considerable implications for his own artistic trajectory as a result of the sadistic and unconstitutional suppression in 1933 of portable murals slated for exhibition at the Hollywood branch of the Communist-affiliated John Reed Clubs. These were created by then-20-year-old Philip Goldstein along with a group of like-minded friends including, among others, Harold Lehman, Murray Hantman and Reuben Kadish. All novice painters, Guston’s cohort was aided by Luis Arénal, brother-in-law of David Alfaro Siqueiros, the famed Mexican revolutionary muralist who’d recently spent time in Los Angeles. Painting in fresco over cement to protest the trumped-up arrest and conviction of the so-called Scottsboro Boys, the Reed Club murals featured brutally honest images (in the Siqueiros mode) deploring anti-Negro atrocities. On February 12th Guston and his fellow participants were forced to watch as the Los Angeles Police Department Red Squad’s Captain William R. Hynes and his American Legion posse bashed their sympathetic portrayals with lead pipes and rifle butts, piercing with bullets the eyes and genitals of the figures they had depicted. The young artists who participated in this event were immediately critiqued in the L.A. press for their “poisoned and poisonous misconception of American life.” Dubbed “misguided individuals,” when the Reed Club painters initiated legal proceedings to try to gain compensation for the trashing of their own Civil Rights, a reactionary judge summarily dismissed their case. My paper describes some both immediate and longer-term ramifications of this little-known instance of artistic response to social injustice engendered by the infamous multiple trials of the Scottsboro Boys. In March of 1931 nine African-American males had been accused of gang-raping two white women—actually vagrants of questionable morality—while riding hobo (on top) of a train passing through Alabama. Lynchings, originally deemed compensatory for white Southern manhood’s perceived loss of authority in the wake of the Civil War and Reconstruction, had been on the upswing since the Klan’s post World War I reinvigoration; increasingly dire economic circumstances after 1929 only exacerbated an already volatile situation. While mob demands to string the “Boys” up were thwarted by the governor’s calling out the National Guard, the grossly inadequate defense provided in the first Scottsboro trial and the tainted deliberations of two all-white juries were to be tantamount to a “legal lynching.” Indeed, although incontrovertible evidence of their innocence was presented by New York litigator Samuel Liebowitz during the second Scottsboro trial, “Jew” money from the North was accused of trying to undermine Alabama justice and the nine defendants (one a very young teenager) were convicted anew. The visual reaction I am describing to the notorious Scottsboro debacle was perpetrated by a small group of disaffected West Coast leftists, doubtlessly motivated in significant measure by “double consciousness” of their own outsider status—Jewish or Hispanic. Many of the painters, particularly Guston, incorporated diaspora connections into imaging their outrage at the Scottsboro Boys’ tragically unjust fate. Research in Reuben Kadish’s papers at the Archives of American Art has enabled a more detailed identification of the exact subject matter of the John Reed Club murals, only a few of which have ever been reproduced. This can aid in producing a fuller analysis of the consequences of a local event closely tied to a larger issue of national prominence and help to expand general understanding of the responses (dis)allowed visual artists in the depression-era to racial and ethnic problems endemic throughout the United States. I will argue, concentrating primarily on its effects on Philip Guston, that the nakedly injudicious politics of the Scottsboro case initiated a dialogue with wide ranging cultural as well as social correlations.