Examples Of Jim Crow Laws In To Kill A Mockingbird

The first influence on Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird are the Jim Crow laws. The Jim Crow laws were cruel to colored people. “Jim Crow laws were an official effort to keep African Americans separate from Whites in the southern United States for many years” (“Jim Crow Laws”1). The Jim Crow laws were put in place to keep Blacks below Whites. People thought that they needed theses laws because they did not believe that there where equal to them. The Whites thought that the Blacks should be below them and they needed the laws to keep it that way.Many times if a Jim Crow law was not followed by a person of color they would be lynched. Lynchings were public, often sadistic, murders carried out by mobs. Between 1882, when the first reliable data were collected, and 1968, when lynchings had become rare, there were 4,730 known lynchings, including 3,440 black men and women.

Jim Crow laws examples can also be found in the book To Kill a Mockingbird. In the book To Kill a Mockingbird there is a man named Tom Robinson. Tom was accused of raping a girl named Mayella and had to go to court. In court Atticus says that Tom was unable to have raped her because the right side of her face was bruised and Tom’s left hand was crippled. Even though most of the evidence pointed to a man named Bob Ewell who is Mayella’s father, Tom was still convicted for the crime. This is an example of the Jim Crow law that Blacks should be below Whites. If the Blacks and Whites were equal then Tom would not have been convicted because the evidence said that he could not have done it. The only reason the the jury called him guilty was because he was a black man. Not only did the idea of Jim Crow laws influence To Kill A Mockingbird so did mob