The Law Has a Bad Opinion of Me: CHICAGO’S PUNITIVE TURN

In January of 1945, with Chicago in a deep freeze, a fictionalized dialogic story entitled “Simple and the Law” by the writer Langston Hughes appeared inside the pages of the Defender. Hughes had been writing such pieces—known as the Simple stories—for some time, the titular character of which (full name, Jesse B. Semple) he imagined as the voice of a workaday black man, a speaker for the proverbial folk. For Hughes, Simple was a vehicle: through him, Hughes ruminated on everything from divorce to love, structural racism to cultural folkways, white people’s use of nigger to black people’s