Similarities Between Scottsboro Boys And To Kill A Mockingbird

Leading up to the Civil Rights Movement, the black community was in a constant battle against law enforcement treating them unfair compared to the white community. The Scottsboro Boys and Emmett Till’s cases were one of the many times that the legal system showed to be unfair to blacks. In the book To Kill A Mockingbird, the law enforcement and community were very racist against blacks and believed all blacks were criminals. In the story, Atticus Finch, who is a lawyer gets put into a very difficult situation and decides to defend a black man, who went by the name of Tom Robinson. Tom Robinson was a black man who was being accused of raping a young girl named Mayella Ewell (Lee). Before Tom Robinson ever goes to trial, the legal system and

What changed everything was when the police questioned two white women who accused the nine black boys of raping them while on the train (History). This was another case, just as the one in To Kill A Mockingbird, where blacks were charged for something that they never truly did, just because a white woman said it was true. Emmett Till, a black fourteen year old boy who was visiting his family in Money, Mississippi, from Chicago, is another case where a black man is falsely accused of a crime that he did not commit. Emmett Till was brutally killed for supposedly flirting with a white woman. Emmett Till had told his friends that he had a white girlfriend back home, so his friends dared him to go talk to the white women in the store. That was when Emmett was accused of “flirting” with the woman (History). The white woman's husband and brother found out about what had supposedly happened and went after Emmett Till. The two men took Emmett Till and beat him until he was almost dead, shot him in the head, and then they threw him into a river while tied to a cotton-gin fan with barbed wire. Emmett was killed on August 28, 1955