Racism In To Kill A Mockingbird And The Long Walk Home

Institutionalized racism gave whites the right to claim their racial superiority. In The Long Walk Home, the discourteous police officer demanded that Odessa Carter leave the whites only park, regardless of the white children that she was appointed to look after. In To Kill a Mockingbird, the all-white jury convicted Tom Robinson of raping Miss Mayella after being presented with more than enough evidence to prove Tom to be an innocent man. Spoken from Michelle Alexander, the highly accredited author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, “Following the Civil War, it was unclear what institutions, laws, or customs would be necessary to maintain white control now that slavery was gone.”(Alexander, pp 26) These scenes from each movie shows that after slavery, this new form

Adam Daniel Beittel, former president of Talladega College (1945-1952) and Tugaloo College (1960-1964), once made a very strong statement about segregated education that also applies to institutionalized racism. He says that it has “one principle or purpose- this is to maintain the superiority of the white, the inferiority of the Negro, to keep the white above and the Negro below.”(Beittel, pp 140) In Walk, other than the bus boycott, this is the most blatant form of institutionalized racism that we see. Odessa Carter, a black woman is being told by a white man, that she should not be in the park, because her kind is not welcome. No explanations needed or given, just solely the ‘whites only’ sign in the park, and the Jim Crow laws. In Mockingbird, any race should be upset at the verdict given to Tom Robinson. We saw Atticus Finch point out that the marks on Miss Mayella’s face were on the right side of her face, and find out that Bob Ewell is left handed. Atticus throws an object to Tom, and he catches it with his right hand, because he permanently paralyzed his left arm when he was a child in a cotton gin, proving that he couldn't have slapped/ beaten Miss