Similarities Between Scottsboro Boys And To Kill A Mockingbird

In the 1930s, there were many conflicts because African Americans were always the ones to get blamed by the prejudicial people who lived in Alabama. When the Scottsboro case was happening, Harper Lee was six years old. So thirty years later, she had written a book based on the Scottsboro case. Nine black men had been accused of rape by a white woman, and in To Kill a Mockingbird, there was one black man who had been accused of rape by a white woman. Harper Lee was inspired by the Scottsboro Boys’ case when writing her novel due to the similarities between them.

To begin, the circumstances surrounding Harper Lee and the Scottsboro boys were similar to those of Mayella and Victoria Price. They both did not have the best home lives and did not have very much money. Since they both came from poor families, they were willing to do anything to keep the little respect that they had. For

Ewell never even thought about taking Mayella to the doctors if she had been raped, nor was there good medical evidence in the case of the Scottsboro boys. Mr. Ewell claims that he had done a lot of running because Mayella got raped, but Atticus starts to say, "‘Mr. Ewell,’ Atticus began, ‘folks were doing a lot of running that night. Let’s see, you say you ran to the house, you ran to the window, you ran inside, you ran to Mayella, you ran for Mr. Tate. Did you, during all this running, run for a doctor?’" (Lee 177). This shows that Mr. Ewell did not care much about her physical condition and wanted to get a point across for Tom Robinson. Bob convinced the jury to find Tom guilty without medical proof that he raped Mayella. The Scottsboro boys’ case was similar: "Their story did not match medical evidence or the stories of other witnesses, and he even got Ruby Bates to testify that the whole story had been made up. The defense seemed inarguable" (McBirney). The nine Scottsboro boys’ had been claimed as innocent only because Ruby Bates claimed that the story was made