Poems Futile in Face of Death, Says Langston Hughes at Kilby

Newspaper Article: click here

"Over Alabama that winter lay the shadow of Scottsboro.  But I heard no discussion whatsoever of the case at Tuskegee, although at nearby Kilby eight of the nine Negro boys involved were in the death house where I went to see them.  (The ninth boy, only thirteen years old, had had a mistrial and was in prison at Birmingham.)  Their chaplain a small-town Negro minister, said it might cheer the boys up if I would read them some of my poems.  So at Kilby Prison I went down the long corridor to the death house to read poetry to the Scottsboro boys.  In their grilled cells in that square room with a steel door to the electric chair at one end, in their gray prison uniforms, the eight black boys sat or lay listlessly in their bunks and paid little attention to me or to the minister as we stood in the corridor, separated from them by bars.  Most of them did not even greet us.  Only one boy came up to the bars and shook hands with me." - Langston Hughes, Autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander

Google News Archive: click here