The Political Plays of Langston Hughes

Abstract

Scottsboro, Limited, written just after Hughes's return from Moscow, was a response to the Scottsboro case, in which a group of young Black men were charged, almost certainly falsely, with raping two white woman in a railway car. The only play in the volume known to have been produced, De Organizer is a poetic and musical celebration of the creation of a sharecroppers' union - a melding of African American culture with left-wing politics, a sort of upbeat, musical, African American Waiting for Lefty.