Harper Lee Quotes

“Although slavery may have been abolished, the crippling poison of racism still persists, and the struggle still continues.” A quote from Harry Belafonte in a rally from 2010 shows how even though the government has addressed the issue of racism by guaranteeing full rights for all born in the US, the deeply seeded racism and blind ignorance in some persist. This can be shown by the realistic fiction novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, where a man named Tom Robinson is falsely accused of raping a girl named Mayella Ewell. Countless amounts of evidence that would have proven Tom guilty were not considered by the jury, and Tom Robinson received the death penalty. In Monster, another realistic fiction book by Walter Dean Myers, two boys,

This time in an adult detention center will permanently scare a person. Even when Steve is not imprisoned, the prejudice is still existent. “What do you mean, don’t worry about it, when you’re handcuffing my son? ...You’re not just snatching my son off like he’s just some kind of criminal” (Myers 271). The police officer just takes Mrs. Harmon's son because he knows someone involved in a crime, and he already treats him as if he were the man who killed Mr. Nesbitt. The police officer believes that if he knew the killer of Mr. Nesbitt, he must have been involved because of his relations with King. Although that does not immediately mean he was involved, the police assume that he is as involved as King. Therefore, Steve’s experience with the US court system was riddled with prejudice and racist stereotypes, overall making his court case unfair from the start to the end. Similarly, in To Kill a Mockingbird, the defendant, Tom Robinson, was blatantly cheated in a court case that was life or death for

N---r always comes out in ‘em” (Lee 244). These quotes show the reader how the citizens of Maycomb react to an African American man attempting to escape and how it is considered typical to do so. It shows how these stereotypes the citizens of Maycomb have regarding the African American community negatively harm his reputation and livelihood. Before he even stepped into the courts, the citizens of Maycomb believed that Mr. Robinson had acted in such a manner that would fit their stereotype of black men, and that means they concluded very quickly on the case. This quote proves the idea. “It occurred to me that in their way, Tom Robinson’s manners were as good as Atticus’s. Until my father explained it to me later, I did not understand the subtlety of Tom’s predicament: he would not have dared strike a white woman under any circumstances and expect to live long, so he took the first opportunity to run—a sure sign of guilt” (Lee 198). Tom was a respectable man and worried about the looming threat that was being against a white man’s