The case Hughes mentioned would have been of particular interest to the Soviet Union, being an early instance of the type of empowering collaboration between Communist ideology and black resistance movements that defined much of the civil-rights and decolonial processes of the twentieth century. The Scottsboro’ Boys were nine African-American teenagers wrongly convicted of raping two white American women after a fight broke out between them and a group of racist white men trying to throw them off a train because of their skin colour.
