Scottsboro Trial Essay

Speaking of racism, the Scottsboro Trials and other racist behaviors displayed by Caucasians in the South have many parallels to what happened in To Kill a Mockingbird. For the most part, the Scottsboro Trials were a series of trials for a group of African American teens who apparently raped two white women who were in a train car with them riding from Tennessee to Alabama (Johnson). Eventually, the juries convicted the men despite substantial amounts of evidence to the contrary (Anderson). Specifically, there were witness accounts that showed that the men were not even in the same train car as the women, medical evidence which showed that there were no indicators of rape on the women, and reports that the women were in fact known prostitutes, which means they faced charges for crossing state lines for immoral purposes
under the Mann Act (Durst). Furthermore, one of the women even retracted her statement (Anderson). Fortunately, the defense repeatedly appealed the case, and the Supreme Court ruled that the counsel for the defense was incompetent; thereby, the court requested a better defense and bumped the case all the way back down the latter. Once again, the jury handed out a guilty verdict to the first man who went on retrial, but then Judge James E. Horton, in a rare move, overturned the entire ruling (Durst). Anyway, the trials were repeatedly staged, appealed, and overturned at various levels over and over again; it took many years for the teens, who were at that point adults, to be released. Evidently, there was more on the mind of the jury than the evidence and the case. As shown by the previously mentioned Jim Crow laws and the Scottsboro Trials, racism infiltrated all parts of life, including the most crucial parts, like the justice system, law enforcement, and the government.
With white supremacists in places of power, things rarely got better for African Americans implicated with a violation of the law. Many of the major events within To Kill a Mockingbird shared surprising similarities with the Scottsboro Trials. Clearly, the Robinson trial itself had the same basic structure as the Scottsboro Boys’ trial. Both Mayella and the two women from the Scottsboro Trials alleged that the African Americans in question raped them (Anderson) (Durst) (Lee 204-206). Moreover in both cases, the defendants could not have possibly committed the crime, due to some pre-existing circumstance; such as the shredded arm for Tom and the separate train car for the Scottsboro Boys (Anderson) (Durst) (Lee 211). Finally, in both cases, the juries found the defendants guilty on charges of rape (Anderson) (Durst) (Lee 240). The stark similarities between the two trials shows that racism was prevalent in Maycomb, like any real Southern
town. In conclusion, the Scottsboro Trials showed that racism can penetrate many of our country’s places and institutions, including our great equalizer, the court system.