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Last Of The Scottsboro Boys Essay

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The article “Last of the Scottsboro Boys get justice long delayed: pardons” by Los Angeles Times, tells the story of the Scottsboro Boys, who were falsely accused of rape, and how justice was finally served to them. It all starts in Fairhope, Alabama. The year is 1931 and the state is still filled with hate and prejudice. A few white boys, two white girls, and nine black teenage boys are aboard a train to Memphis. Someone gets jostled and a fight breaks out. As the white boys were outnumbered, they ran and told the police, who proceed to arrest each black man on the train. The two white girls were found claiming they had been raped. Each of the boys except for the youngest one were put on death row. The author talks about how along the way, …show more content…

It was a black man’s word against a white’s, and in that time period, a white’s word would always trump the word of a black. Further proof that the book was based on the Scottsboro boys trial, is that Sheila finds a book that had been rolled in layers of plastic. In addition, Harper Lee included a scene from the book where scout and jem find a box hidden in a tree. In chapter 4 “Jem looked around, reached up, and gingerly pocketed a tiny shiny package … inside were two scrubbed and polished pennies one on top of the other.” This passage shows how both the book incorporates the story of the Scottsboro boys’. Boo Radley in the book can represent the Scottsboro boys’ who went into hiding. They went into hiding because both their lives had been changed over something they had been punished unfairly for. Justice for Boo and for the Scottsboro boys didn’t come for long after. This quote from the article shows how the Scottsboro boys never received there justice they deserved while they were alive and how they had to go into hiding, “Justice remained undone for some of the boys as they became men, went into hiding, and eventually died with their reputations smeared”. Boo Radley had rumors

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