Compare And Contrast The Scottsboro Trials And The Salem Witch Trials

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Racism and Vengeance
Humans judge others on how they look, where they come from, or just plainly who they are; it is human nature. Everyone judges someone at some point in their lives, but how far are people willing to take their judgement. In the 1930’s, at a time when racism was at its peak, nine black boys got in a freight train fight with a couple white vagrants. The boys’ consequences were fatal. The Scottsboro trials and the Salem witch trials are closely related by the way both had a certain person that brought about these scandalous trials, both had the higher powers in the community unreasonably accuse people, and in both trials all the people were put to death while others were awaiting for their death. In the Scottsboro trials all the boys involved were set up by two girls, they were the ones that accused them. “No other event so clearly demonstrated the extent of racial injustice” (Baughman). Those two girls, Ruby and Victoria, were the cause of multiple innocent lives being taken. They told the police that all nine of …show more content…

Proctor once said “I cannot judge another” (Miller, IV, 653). More people should live by these words. These people that accused others were trying to act like God. They probably thought they were doing God a favor when they killed all those innocent humans, but in reality they were murdering irreproachable people. “In his bid for re-election, Horton [was] defeated” (Lewis). Horton was the judge for the Scottsboro case, and he never gave those boys a chance. Same as did Danforth, he never gave the people of Salem a chance to prove that they were innocent, he just hung them. When Danforth campaigned again for the position as the judge in Salem, he did not win the race. This may have been a result for all the people’s lives both of those men have taken. Vengeance, this is what drove people to do all those horrifying