Boris A. Max

Boris A. Max, the lawyer who represents Bigger Thomas, turns the case into an argument about the social order that produced and judges it. At the inquest and in court, he challenges the distance between white benefactors’ charitable intentions and the discriminatory arrangements from which they profit. His defense does not rest on declaring Bigger innocent or asking the court for uncomplicated sympathy: Max insists instead that the court examine the conditions connecting Bigger’s life to the society around him.

Identity and Role

Max enters the story as Bigger’s lawyer, but the public presentation of his role is already politically charged. A newspaper headline describes the defense as being taken over by Reds, and State’s Attorney David A. Buckley attacks Communists who defend Bigger, using the case to denounce Red activity. The available evidence identifies Max with the defense under this anti-Communist scrutiny; it does not establish his formal membership in a political organization. Against Buckley’s effort to make the defense itself suspect, Max insists on placing Bigger’s case within a wider account of social responsibility.

His position is neither that Bigger’s actions do not matter nor that he should be treated simply as an innocent victim. In court, Max explicitly rejects that framing. He argues that reducing the case to a claim of injustice would leave the deeper conditions untouched, and urges the court to recognize a way of life formed by collective social arrangements. The distinction is central to his role: he asks the court to understand how a person’s circumstances become socially legible as threat and crime without turning that understanding into a denial of the crime.

The Inquest and the Challenge to Charity

At the inquest into Mary Dalton’s death, Max questions Henry Dalton about the business practices behind his public generosity. Dalton acknowledges that he formulates the policies of his two companies. Max presses him on why Black families, including the Thomas family, pay higher rent than white families for comparable housing. Dalton disclaims control over rent scales and invokes supply and demand. Max then makes the disparity concrete: the Thomas family pays eight dollars a week for one unventilated, rat-infested room in which four people eat and sleep, despite Dalton’s donations to Black education.

Max continues by asking whether the company’s policy keeps Black residents concentrated in one area on the South Side. Dalton concedes that it works that way, while saying he did not originate the policy. When Max asks whether profits taken through rent are returned as charity to ease the harm, Dalton calls the description a distortion. The exchange exposes the contrast Max is pursuing: Dalton’s philanthropy may express personal concern, but it does not undo the housing arrangements that keep Black tenants confined and charge them more. The charitable gift and the profitable rental relationship coexist; Max asks the hearing to consider both rather than allowing generosity to stand in for structural change.

The coroner intervenes when Max’s questioning becomes too direct, defending Dalton’s standing and threatening to remove Max if he continues. Max turns and walks back to his seat without further interruption, his face pale and his lips set. The exchange marks a limit on what the inquest will hear: questions about the economic conditions surrounding the Thomas family are treated as improper even while the proceeding examines the deaths at the center of the case. When Bessie’s body is introduced, Bigger understands that her death will help make him appear monstrous and intensify the demand for his own death. His perception sharpens the racial imbalance Max’s questioning has already raised: Bessie’s death can be used as evidence against Bigger, while, in Bigger’s understanding, the case’s public urgency rests chiefly on Mary’s death.

Meeting Bigger in Jail

After Bigger’s capture, Max meets him in a small room in the jail. Bigger arrives in handcuffs; once the links are removed, he sits opposite Max beneath a single electric light, unable at first to answer him. He feels that his life is helplessly in his own hands and waits for Max to tell him what to do. That dependence unsettles him: he fears that he is once again waiting for someone else to direct him, even as he wonders what his lawyer can do against the hatred gathering around the case.

Max answers Bigger’s despair by describing the danger as larger than one defendant. He tells him that the hostility facing him resembles the hostility he has faced throughout his life, and that resisting his destruction matters because others could be destroyed in the same way. Bigger replies that he cannot win. Max does not promise victory; he asks whether Bigger trusts him. Their exchange establishes the personal terms of the defense. Max offers commitment and a reason to resist, while Bigger’s exhausted uncertainty makes trust a question rather than an assumption.

The Courtroom Argument

In his courtroom plea, Max addresses the judge, Buckley, and the crowd, and declares that the case touches the destiny of the nation. He presents Bigger as a test of whether the court can see how an individual life is connected to wider social arrangements. Max acknowledges that Bigger is a criminal and that, as a Black defendant, he enters court at a disadvantage. He does not claim that the court should treat Bigger as a victim of injustice or respond only with sympathy. Instead, he asks it to understand the conditions that have made such a life possible and to consider changing them.

Max develops that argument through the unequal relationship between the Thomas and Dalton families. Their connection runs through rent, commerce, and employment: the Thomas family remains poor while the Dalton family grows rich. Dalton’s money for Black education does not compensate for a housing policy that restricts Black tenants to the Black Belt. Max’s image of Bigger being kept in that enclosed world links segregation to personal estrangement: the same system that keeps Bigger a stranger to Mary also keeps Mary a stranger to him. Their fatal encounter occurs across a racial division that neither charity nor good intention has removed.

Max extends the account beyond housing. He argues that Black people are told where to live, how much education they may receive, where they may eat, and what work they may do. School may cultivate the same ambitions as it does in white children, but life outside the school door imposes a different path. Max also points to the visible attractions of modern urban life—advertisements, radio, newspapers, and movies—as promises that can become taunts when fulfillment is out of reach. The plea thus treats Bigger’s circumstances not as a private misfortune but as a collision between encouraged desires and socially enforced limits.

He makes the courtroom itself part of his evidence. Black and white spectators sit apart, Max observes, not because anyone has explicitly ordered them into separate groups but because they understand that the white spectators do not want to share a bench with them. From that scene he widens his argument to the Black population as a people held within the nation but deprived of political, social, economic, and property rights. He warns that killing and exclusion cannot make that population disappear or permanently suppress its search for another way of life. In his account, the violence the court fears is bound to the separation and denial that the court might otherwise treat as ordinary.

Significance and Limits

Max’s defense gives institutional form to a counterargument against the case’s racialized public story. Where Buckley uses the defense’s Communist associations to cast suspicion on Max, Max uses the courtroom to question the respectable arrangements behind racial inequality. His cross-examination of Dalton and his address to the judge share a method: they connect individual statements and visible procedures to the housing, economic, and racial relations those procedures can conceal.

The defense remains an argument, not a claim that Bigger bears no responsibility. Max asks the court to hold together two facts that the public response threatens to separate: Bigger has committed grave crimes, and the society judging him has helped shape the restricted conditions in which his life has unfolded. By refusing both simple exoneration and simple condemnation, Max makes the trial a test of whether the court can recognize that connection. His significance lies in forcing that larger question into the proceedings, even as the inquest’s interruption of his questions shows how readily institutional authority can defend respectability against scrutiny.