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Examples Of Injustice In To Kill A Mockingbird

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All around America justice is said to be brought to everyone, and everyone has the right to a fair trial, but this is not the case for a falsely accused man named Tom Robinson. In the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, the story takes place during the Great Depression, meaning that racism is still a common thing in many places, including Maycomb. The father of Jem and Scout, Atticus is a lawyer who is forced to take a case defending a black man of being accused of rape. Since Atticus has no choice whether is able to take the case or not, he knows that the outcome will be the same no matter what due to Tom Robinson’s race. This problem is the climax of the story due to the injustice that Tom has to deal with during his case. Racial …show more content…

Around the end of the case when Atticus is leaving the courtroom, the author brings up how all of the black people are sitten in one area away from the others. “All around us and in the balcony on the opposite wall, the Negroes were getting to their feet.” “Miss Jean Loiuse, stand up. Your father’s passin’.” (Lee 241). Like stated before, many people already knew the outcome of the case such as many of the colored people. This quote is significant to the point that there is racial injustice because colored people are separated from the whites in the courtroom, and that everyone already knew that he would be found guilty because of his …show more content…

Tom thinks that he would rather die trying to fight and escape for what is right, rather than die rotting in a jail cell for something he didn’t do. Tom then attempted to escape from jail by running and jumping over the prison fence. “They shot him,” “Seventeen bullets in him,” (Lee 268). Although he was an escaping prisoner, this can be seen as racial prejudice for the reason that he was shot seventeen times. This is the important part of the sequence. There was obvious racism because of the amount of times the police chose to shoot him. After the finch family heard about the news, they even thought that, “They didn’t have to shoot him that much, “ (Lee 268). This shows that they understand that he was in the wrong for attempting to escape, but they can agree that seventeen bullets was too many for it to be a just way to stop him. The fact that they were able to agree that he was shot too many times for what he was doing, leads to believe that there could be a potential change in the society of

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Leading up to the Civil Rights Movement, the black community was in a constant battle against law enforcement treating them unfair compared to the white community. The Scottsboro Boys and Emmett Till’s cases were one of the many times that the legal system showed to be unfair to blacks. In the book To Kill A Mockingbird, the law enforcement and community were very racist against blacks and believed all blacks were criminals. In the story, Atticus Finch, who is a lawyer gets put into a very difficult situation and decides to defend a black man, who went by the name of Tom Robinson.

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When he was announcing the final verdict, “Judge Taylor was polling the jury: ‘guilty… guilty… guilty… guilty…” (Lee 112). Before the trial even happened, “Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed” meaning he knew he was not going to win (Lee 128). The jury was biased from the beginning because it was all white. The case wasn't fair because Tom never had a chance of winning because he was going up against a white man and a white man would always win against a black man.

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It was obvious that he knows better to do what he was convicted of doing, and his left arm was useless. Tom said that he has been in trouble with the law before. He had once received thirty days for disorderly conduct because he got in a fight using self defence against a person who was going to cut him, which he did succeed in his left shoulder. Tom is the nicest man in this whole entire book, To Kill a Mockingbird which was written by Harper Lee. Tom wasn’t ever caught up in any lie and wasn’t hesitant to answer the questions he was asked.

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Harper Lee adds this to help the audience visualize the moral obligation and strong will Atticus has to guard Tom, who is at risk of facing an unfair trial due to his skin color. Moreover, he does not care about how defending Tom will affect his reputation, and this teaches Scout about the difference between the right and the easy decision. Later, Mr. Underwood explains to Scout, “Atticus had used every tool available to free men to save Tom Robinson, but in the secret courts of men’s hearts, Atticus had no case. Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed.” (Lee 323).

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Atticus is appointed a case by Judge Taylor to defend a black man named Tom Robinson who has been accused of raping a white girl named Mayella Ewell. Because of the racism and prejudice against black people, he believes that he will not win this case and could risk the life of Tom Robinson. Because of this case, Scout gets bullied by Francis about how his dad is defending a black man, Atticus later talks to Scout about how “[Tom Robinson] lives in [a] settlement behind the town dump….there’s been some high talk around the town to the effect that I shouldn’t do much about defending this man” (Lee 86). Atticus knows that something bad can happen to him if he were to defend Tom Robinson but still does so because he has the courage to do it. After the trial had ended, Atticus was waiting for news but he did not expect something so terrible and heartbreaking, Tom Robinson, unfortunately, died after being shot several times.

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Finally, after Tom was shot seventeen times while attempting to escape from jail, it stunned the Finch family because they knew Tom was innocent. While this event seemed horrid and shocking to the Finch family was just “‘one Negro, more or less, among two hundred of ‘em? He wasn’t Tom to them, he was an escaping prisoner’” (Lee 125) to Maycomb county. This ties back to the theme of the novel because it is terrible to shoot a black person and most to have most white people not care or think twice about it.

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In To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee exemplifies the inequality and discriminatory treatment of the African Americans, as well as social classes, some of the same unfair treatment is still relevant today in the U.S., although it may not be as extreme. Harper Lee uses Tom Robinson to show police brutality from the way he was killed in jail, harshly. Atticus explains how Tom Robinson was killed; "Seventeen bullet holes in him. They didn't have to shoot him that much,"(Lee 315). Based on this evidence it is clear that the police shot Tom Robinson too many times and therefore they were very brutal, this demonstrates police brutality.

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