The Scottsboro Trials and To Kill a Mockingbird In the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, the famous father named Atticus says “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… until you climb into his skin and walk around in it (Judith 2). This quote is said during a time of intense racism. “Not long after Obama took office, the National Urban League released its 2009 State of Black America report. The findings showed that racial inequities continued in employment, housing, health care, education, criminal justice, and other areas” (Buckley 1). This essay will primarily focus on the criminal justice area of this when discussing the Scottsboro trials and comparing the trials to the famous novel To Kill a Mockingbird.
Topic: Scottsboro Trials Sources: Remembering Scottsboro: The legacy of an infamous trial, The Trials of the Scottsboro boys, and Scottsboro and its legacy: The cases that challenged american legal and social justice. Thesis: The Scottsboro Trials were an important piece of history because it was a huge stepping stone of the civil rights movement and it showed the racial inequality in America which was then taken to the supreme court. (support statement) No crime in American history, produced as many trials, convictions, reversals and retrials as did the alleged gang rape of two white girls by nine black teenagers. (Supported Statement 2)
She used these experiences from her childhood to create the protagonist Scout Finch. This novel shows a glimpse of Lee’s early life, thus building a relationship between the reader and text by proving that she saw all the injustices as those of the Scottsboro Trails. In the society Lee lived, people continuously assumed “…[when] it’s a white man’s word against a black man’s, the white man always [won]” and no one dared to correct it (Lee 295). She is showing that by living during those dark and painful years, she is knowledgeable of how different types of people were being treated. So Scout’s experiences throughout the novel showcase what it was like growing up in the South of Alabama during the 1930s.
The Scottsboro Boys Accused of a crime they didn’t commit, nine African American boys in 1931 were given death sentences for raping two white girls on a train coming through Scottsboro, Alabama. The youngest boy convicted in what is later known as the Scottsboro Boys trail was the one to hold the trial in a hung jury in a white trial. This trial was an important trail in America because it showed that the courts were racist towards African Americans by convicting them of crimes they didn’t do, listening to two stories’ to convict nine men and giving them harsh punishments. Nine African American men were hopping trains to find work and start a new life, but they got stop when two white men started a fight, that some of the nine men broke
From the crime to the trial, there are parallels between the crimes and trials. On March 25, 1931, a freight train was stopped in Paint Rock, a tiny community in northern Alabama, and nine young African American men who had been riding the rails were arrested. Two white women, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, descended from the freight cars, and accused the men of raping them on the train. As a result, the accused men were taken to the Scottsboro jail.
The Scottsboro boys trial and the Tom Robinson trial in To Kill a Mockingbird are similar for these reasons. Mayella Ewell represents Victoria Price and Ruby Bates because Mayella made the crowd fell bad for her because she was a white, shy, and an unstable women. I think Lee kept these details the same because in the Scottsboro trial Price and Bates were the ones “raped”, and in the Robinson trial Mayella was the one “raped”. As I said Price and Bates are being represented by Mayella in the Robinson trial. Another similarity was that both trails were about rape.
There was no such thing as a fair trial for a black person during the time Harper Lee was writing her novel. As the oppressed, colored citizens of the 1930s south do everything they can to try and stand up for justice, the superior race--the whites--uses all its power to ensure nobody does anything to the fixed, unjust, status
Imagine that your living in the 1930s, you’re a white woman, and you had just gotten “raped” by a black man or group of black men. This exact scenario happened in the critically acclaimed book To Kill a Mockingbird and in the real-life court case deemed the Scottsboro trial. Which in both the book and the court case, the characters, and people were shaped and influenced by society to become victims and accusers. This paper is going compare and contrast how the fictional character Mayella and the non-fictional plaintiff Victoria Price and Ruby Bates as painted victims and accusers by society.
Most Americans 65% including majorities across racial and ethnic groups say it has become more common for people to express racism toward other ethnicities. Throughout this essay, there will be two examples of racism that will be discussed. Number one the Scottsboro trial and number 2 the To Kill A Mockingbird novel . These examples genuinely show the negative factors of racism.
Rabina Mainali Sign 111 Dr. Dulan 3 November, 2015 Witnesses of the Scottsboro trials The Scottsboro trials came about during the year 1931 when Great Depression had hit the South hard. In search of work several individuals boarded a freight train from Chattanooga to Memphis, Tennessee not knowing their future ahead wasn’t so bright. While in the train a white man stepped on a black man’s hand, later identified as belonging to Haywood Patterson. A fight between the white youths and Patterson’s
Lee uses Miss Gates’s ironic views of Hitler and Tom’s trial to show how racial prejudice causes crimes against African Americans to be considered less than crimes committed against white people. A mockingbird is then used to symbolize Tom Robinson as an innocent person wrongly convicted of a crime because of his skin color. The misunderstood characterization of Arthur Radley shows how society will let prejudice guide their imaginated view on the lives of people they don't understand. All three characters provide examples of how a preconceived opinion of one person or a whole race can cause drastic misunderstandings and
Harper Lee´s life is similar to the character Scout from To Kill A Mockingbird. The Scottsboro trial was occurring when Harper Lee was growing up, and the Tom Robinson case was occurring when Scout was growing up. Harper Lee used lots of her family names for names for people for To Kill A Mockingbird. Harper Lee and Scout were both tomboys and both a had boy bestfriend.
The Scottsboro Boys Case and To Kill a Mockingbird were cases of the injustice of black men. Harper Lee was trying to point out that a person 's skin color or race does not justify the actions they done, that anyone who practices prejudice is foolish. That prejudice is an actual reality that a person experiences first hand and hurts others in the process. Like Harper Lee with her father being a lawyer she must’ve experienced it first hand. These stories teach us that you shouldn’t judge a person by their race.
Her story directly reflects the time of the 1960s and what Lee saw. She was done watching innocent people be convicted or killed because no one did the right thing so she did something about it. In Lee's story, she speaks using Atticus as a beacon for delivering lessons she thought
As can be seen, Lee’s usage of Tom Robinson’s trial and the racial discrimination and prejudice seen throughout it helps reinforce the theme of social injustice throughout To Kill A Mockingbird. Another encounter that the
