Similarities Between Scottsboro Trial And To Kill A Mockingbird

Throughout the 1800s and early 1900s, racism was still a huge part in our society and this is demonstrated through the Scottsboro Trial and the novel To Kill a Mockingbird. The first place this is shown, was after everybody heard about the supposed rape of the white girls. There were protests and tons of people showing hate towards the black men. Another example of this, was all the assumptions white people made, that the only logical explanation for the incident was that the black men raped the white girls. This assumption was without listening to the evidence or facts proving the man's innocence during the trial. Using the evidence from the Scottsboro case and from To kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee clearly portrayed the racism that was still going on at that time throughout her book.

This was the information Lee used when making her character Tom Robinson. Before the trial started, Tom Robinson was imprisoned in the county jail with no protection from police guards, so Atticus went himself to protect Tom. “In ones and twos, men got out of the cars. Shadows became substance as lights revealed solid shapes moving toward the jail door.” Likewise to when many people during the Scottsboro incident didn’t even want the boys go to trial, the men that showed up to the jail were there to kill Tom due to the bias towards blacks going on in that time. In both trials there was another similarity and that was the fact that every white person believed the girl who got raped, without taking in account the facts or