Race Relations 1930s

Race Relations and Injustices in the 1930s and Today

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee showcases the racial injustices and tensions that were presented in the 1930s; since the 1930s the racial tensions have improved, but with improvement, there will always be a struggle and other circumstances that prevent complete equality from prevailing. Segregation, racism, and inequality have all been obstacles that were presented in the 1930s. Issues that have arisen were racial bias and profiling that occur not only in the south, but even in the U.S. Criminal Justice System. Although race relations and social injustices have improved since the 1930s, some issues such as racism towards citizens who are not considered white Americans have stayed similar

Though many people think that in a courtroom everything is fair, it truly was not even today; an issue that arose throughout the years to the present time would be racial profiling. According to Novels for Students by Diane Telgen, the only people who could serve in the courtroom as a jury were required to be white male who were also property owners. This majorly differentiates from present time because today every person, no matter what race, gender, and religion can serve in the courtroom as a jury. Today not only in the courtroom people everywhere racially profile people who are not considered white citizens.As specified by the Sentencing Project, “Extensive research has shown that in such situations the vast majority of Americans of all races implicitly associate black Americans with adjectives such as ‘dangerous’, ‘aggressive’, ‘violent’, and ‘criminal’. Since the nature of the; law enforcement frequently requires the police officers to make snap judgments about the danger posed subjects and the criminal nature of their activity, subconscious racial associations influence the way officers perform their job” (Racial Disparities: U.S. Criminal Justice System). Racially profiling people started very recently; the police racially profiling people and arresting them, thus destroys the belief of “innocent until proven guilty” in which is embedded in the U.S. Criminal Justice

Racists in the 1930s committed several acts of violence and got away with it. Tom Dent writes in his novel Southern Journey, that the lynched body African American Man was found on the Pearl River bridge as traffic of the cars flowed normally; this was never brought to attention. People who would fight back or even cause minor racial flare-ups could end up dead or with severe punishments from gangs such as the Ku Klux Klan. The murder of an African American man was never brought to any attention the quote above demonstrates how the body of a black man was hanging and the traffic flowed normally as if someone was not just murdered. As mentioned in To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, “The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people carrying resentments right into the jury box. As you grow older, you’ll see that white men cheat black men every day of your life ”(Lee 253). This quote from To Kill a Mockingbird illustrates that white men at this time believed that they were entitled to cheat and humiliate black men every day just because of the difference of skin color. When the jury was chosen, they were already about to cheat the African American man just because of situations from the past or even because at the time they believed that a black man was always