Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird takes place in rural south Alabama in a town called Maycomb during the Great Depression, in a time when many Southerners both accepted and expected discrimination toward minorities. Atticus Finch, a widowed father of two, trying to raise his children well, teaches them to see things from another’s perspective. Lee incorporates the crucial quality of empathy in the feelings of the characters and expresses the empathetic theme with the influence of racism and prejudice in Maycomb society within the main characters Scout, Jem, and Atticus.…
The Scottsboro Case is known to many. It is a significant case involving racism, lynching, segregation, and the Jim Crow laws. The case started on March 25, 1931, when two white women accused nine black men of rape while on a train headed to Jackson County, Alabama. The trial lasted years and ended with an unconstitutional verdict of guilty against the defendants. “Scottsboro captured South’s racism and the disturbance of the Great Depression.” (Scottsboro Trials). The Scottsboro Trials and Tom Robinson’s trial in the novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee have many similarities. With the similarities there are differences too. The stories that the people involved tell is one. In the case…
To begin with,the Scottsboro Boys are 9 African American boys.It all started March 15, 1931 during The Great Depression. The 9 boys was hanging off the side of the train illegally when a white guy stepped on his hand. Immediately a fight broke out between the blacks and whites.After the fight the whites got off the train and told the police that they were assaulted by 9 blacks. Eventually the black boys were forced off the train. The police somehow managed to find 2 white girls Ruby Bates and Victoria Price and persuade them to accuse the blacks of rape. Rape was a huge conviction like murder. During an 8 week time span the nine boys were convicted of rape and sentenced to death except the youngest one age 13 who was sentenced to life in…
“The tragedy of life is not death, but what we let die inside of us while we are living”. I learned about two admirable stories one was non-realistic and the other was realistic(true story). They are very similar to each other, the first one is a novel called To Kill a Mockingbird written by Harper Lee about a man named Tom Robinson who was on trial for being accused of raping a white woman. The second story was a documentary called Scottsboro: An American Tragedy about nine men accused the same crime. Racism is the main point in both of these devastating stories. I believe that racism is the reason why they are suffering this same tragedy.…
The geographic settings in both cases are in Alabama. Tom Robinson’s trials took place in Maycomb, Alabama; the Scottsboro trials took place in Scottsboro, Alabama. Both cases were during the Great Depression and in the 1930s. Such was the backdrop of Harper Lee’s childhood when the Scottsboro case would have left such an impression. Lee wrote her novel with many similarities of her life as a child, the setting of the novel and the setting of the Scottsboro trial share similarities. The geographic setting is an important similarity, but it is not as important as the racism expressed against Tom Robinson and the Scottsboro Boys.…
As of today, we still have problem with prejudice and racism towards blacks. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is a novel illustrating the struggles of a racist town in Alabama. Characters are at a struggle to comprehend the way people act. Knowing this, they have to learn what is right and act accordingly. Throughout Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, characters discover and begin to emphasize each other’s lives in large portions and in doing so, many characters develop and mature to understand the world they live in.…
The role of the setting in To Kill a Mockingbird is to set the mood or tone for the novel. In To Kill a Mockingbird the setting is Maycomb, Alabama in the early 1930s, during the years of the Great Depression. The whole story grows out of this particular background. From the description of the setting, the reader can gain a sense of what is going on and where it is occurring. Since the novel takes place during the Great Depression, readers can assume that many in the town are poor or struggling financially. Also, since the story is occurring during the early 1930s, readers can tell that segregation is still present along with racism. In the novel, the different places that Harper Lee describes, helps establish the atmosphere of that specific…
The Scottsboro trials occurred in the 1930s and had nine African American boys aging from thirteen to seventeen and they were accused of raping two girls on a train. Eight of the nine boys were sentenced to death and one of them was too young for the death penalty so he was sentenced to life in prison. There was a lot of evidence that pointed to them being innocent. Like the two girls were examined by a doctor and he found no evidence of rape, but he was not called to court, but he told a lot of people. Also they found out the girls were prostitutes and they were crossing a border illegally so they covered it up saying they were raped. Later on, during the case one of the girls admitted that she was never raped. Also the boys were not in the same train cart as the girls (Johnson). The Scottsboro trials are a lot like Tom Robinson’s trial in To Kill a Mockingbird. The cases are a lot alike, because they both took place during the Great Depression and they both are rape cases. Also the towns took the white person’s side instead of the African Americans sides (Johnson). That is why the Scottsboro trials are like the trials in To Kill a…
To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, continues to be taught today and should continue, as the characterization of the story, although fictional, has a high resemblance to real life cases and issues of the time. It captures critical lessons and teachings that are imperative to modern-day schools and present-day society. To Kill A Mockingbird depicts the inequality between blacks and whites in the 1930s by telling a captivating story including the issues of rape and racism. Although the fictional novel To Kill A Mockingbird was set in the 1930s, it references Civil Rights cases involving discrimination, racism, and segregation that were part of the Civil Rights movement throughout the whole century.…
“Racism and injustice and violence sweep our world, bringing a tragic harvest of heartache and death,” Billy Graham once said. In Harper Lee’s novel “To Kill A Mockingbird Atticus is a father and a lawyer, who lives with his children, Jem and Scout, and their cook, Calpurnia, in a town of Maycomb, Alabama. Maycomb is a town populated with black and white people, where racism is apparent. White people feel they are superior than the black people and treat them poorly. Racism is evident when Tom Robinson lost the trial to Bob Ewell, because he was black, even though he is innocent. People were also being judged on appearance, or being treated improperly, like how people see the kind of person Boo Radley is in the beginning of the story. Harper Lee’s novel “To Kill A Mockingbird” is about injustice.…
Martin Luther King once declared, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. “ This widely known quote shows that the color of a person should not limit the from doing anything. The topic of racism is frequently visited in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel that takes place during the Great Depression. It focuses on the life of Scout Finch, her brother and the neighborhood she has grown up in, Maycomb County. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee uses racism in the trial scene to show that some people are treated unjustly due to their status. This theme is used to represent characters in the novel to show how race creates tension between the people of Maycomb. The treatment of Tom Robinson during the trial scene reveals that people of the…
The Scottsboro Trials were among the most infamous episodes of legal injustice in the Jim Crow South. The events that culminated in the trials began in the early spring of 1931, when nine young black men were falsely accused of raping two white women on a train. The cases were tried and appealed in Alabama and twice argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. Despite evidence that exonerated the accused and even a retraction by one of the accusers, the state pursued the case and all-white juries delivered guilty verdicts that initially carried the death penalty. Several of the accused were sentenced to prison terms and all endured long stays in prison as the case made its way through the legal system. The case later served as one of the inspirations for Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird.…
1930’s Maycomb, Alabama, the setting for the Harper Lee novel To Kill A Mockingbird. A novel which highlights the issue of social inequality, and the asinine binds of racial division in the 1930s South. Tom Robinson, an African American gentleman, was falsely accused of the rape of Mayella Ewell, an impoverished young white woman, and had to battle for his life at court in a racist, and prejudice society. But social inequality is not limited to only race. All people of all different backgrounds, ages, and financial statuses may experience forms of social inequality.…
The novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee took the world by storm in 1960s with a story about southern racism and discrimination. Although the novel focused on small town life in southern Alabama, it influenced the future and success of the Civil Rights Movement. Harper Lee wrote this novel in a childs point of view at the beginning of the Civil Rights Era when events such as the murder of Emmett Till, the lunch counter sit-ins, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott put Alabama at the center of the movement. Throughout this era there was a great deal of racial discrimination and the expectation that no one would try to argue with the whites assumed authority. In Lees book, the focus is centered on the conviction of Tom Robinson, a poor black man. He was convicted of raping Mayella Ewell, the daughter of a notoriously poor white family in a small town called Maycomb. The protagonists father, Atticus, took on the case but only did so because otherwise, I couldnt hold up my head in town, I couldnt represent this county in the legislature, and I couldnt even tell you or Jem not to do something again. Atticus also struggled with the fact that he had no hope of winning due to the race of his client. Ts morbid, watching a poor devil on trial for his life. Look at all those folks, its like a Roman carnival. At the end of the trial, Tom was convicted and sentenced to death, despite undeniable evidence that he was innocent. These results shocked readers and reminded many of the Scottsboro trials and how unfair they were. In addition, the childs point of view on To Kill a Mockingbird allowed many white southerners to question the way the system was if even a child could point out its flaws. After these realizations, the famous novel was quickly made into a movie, expanding its audience even further. After the movies big debut, several significant events occurred, which shaped the Civil Rights Movement and America as we know it today. For example, within a few years,…
The Scottsboro Boys were nine black teenage boys accused of rape in Alabama in 1931. The landmark set of legal cases from this incident dealt with racism and the right to a fair trial.…