In Our Court's All Men Are Created Equal

Some feel that our courts are safe and true, others would say our courts have various flaws and don’t always fulfill the truth. In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch is the father to two young children, Scout and Jem, and works as a lawyer as a single father in their small southern town in Alabama during the thirties. Atticus gets handed a case when he has to defend a black man over a white woman. Through the use of racism and symbolism, Atticus’s claim that “out courts are the great levelers, and in our court’s all men are created equal,” is proved to be unsuitable. Through the use of racism, Harper Lee proves that Atticus’s belief of “in our court’s all men are created equal,” is demonstrated to be incorrect. In the novel,

Early on in the novel, Atticus has to shoot a dog that gets rabies in front of his children. When Atticus’s trial is over, Scout brings that scene back up stating, “… it was like watching Atticus walk into the street, raise a rifle to his shoulder and pull the trigger, but watching all the time knowing that the gun was empty.” This quotation proves to the reader that the dog is representing racism and Atticus is literally standing face-to-face from it trying to prevent the racism from spreading into the town, but knowing the whole time that it wasn’t going to work. The dog is a significant element to the novel because it helps build emotion to the theme of acceptance and human equality. This proves that Atticus’s point of “all men are created equal” is improper because his attempt of proving a black man’s innocence, even though it was entirely evident, failed due to racism in the town during that time period. In To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Atticus, the father, claims “our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts all men are created equal,” is proven to be wrong through the use of symbolism and racism. From shooting racism with an empty gun to having two wiser figures tell two children how bad the racism has gotten in their town, Harper Lee makes a point of social inequality. From the thirties