Wild Burning Rage and Song: Replies to Scottsboro

A concert-lecture on the Scottsboro Trials, which stand as one of the most renowned miscarriages of justice in American history. This free event features a lecture and music. No registration is required. The performance will be followed by a Q&A session.

The trials began in 1931 with a false accusation of rape against nine Black teenagers. The case went on to invigorate the Civil Rights movement, earn the international support of the Communist Party and establish itself as a watchword on the American Left. It inspired artistic reactions as well, most famously by poets Langston Hughes and Richard Wright and novelist Harper Lee, who adapted its events in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

The program brings this world alive as a concert-lecture featuring Professor Amelia Glaser, author of “Songs in Dark Times: Yiddish Poetry of Struggle from Scottsboro to Palestine,” composer/vocalists Heather Klein and Anthony Russell, and composer/pianist Uri Schreter, performing their new settings of Yiddish and English poetry written in response to the pervasive climate of race prejudice that gave birth to the Scottsboro trials – and other injustices to come.

The event is part of the Stahl Center’s “Colors of Jewishness” series, supported by Bader Philanthropies and the Ettinger Family Foundation. The event is cosponsored by Edot Midwest, the UWM History Department, the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies, and the Division of Community Empowerment and Institutional Inclusivity.