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The Influence of History on American Literature
The scottsboro boys research
The scottsboro boys research
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More handpicked essays just for you.
The Influence of History on American Literature
The scottsboro boys research
The scottsboro boys research
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Rabina Mainali Sign 111 Dr. Dulan 3 November, 2015 Witnesses of the Scottsboro trials The Scottsboro trials came about during the year 1931 when Great Depression had hit the South hard. In search of work several individuals boarded a freight train from Chattanooga to Memphis, Tennessee not knowing their future ahead wasn’t so bright. While in the train a white man stepped on a black man’s hand, later identified as belonging to Haywood Patterson. A fight between the white youths and Patterson’s
The Scottsboro boys trial and the Tom Robinson trial in To Kill a Mockingbird are similar for these reasons. Mayella Ewell represents Victoria Price and Ruby Bates because Mayella made the crowd fell bad for her because she was a white, shy, and an unstable women. I think Lee kept these details the same because in the Scottsboro trial Price and Bates were the ones “raped”, and in the Robinson trial Mayella was the one “raped”. As I said Price and Bates are being represented by Mayella in the Robinson trial. Another similarity was that both trails were about rape.
Imagine that your living in the 1930s, you’re a white woman, and you had just gotten “raped” by a black man or group of black men. This exact scenario happened in the critically acclaimed book To Kill a Mockingbird and in the real-life court case deemed the Scottsboro trial. Which in both the book and the court case, the characters, and people were shaped and influenced by society to become victims and accusers. This paper is going compare and contrast how the fictional character Mayella and the non-fictional plaintiff Victoria Price and Ruby Bates as painted victims and accusers by society.
Do you know someone that is a good person but has had bad things happen to them? In Mississippi Trial, 1955 by Chris Crowe and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee many characters that fit this description arise. These two novels share many similarities, including characters, settings, themes, and the points of view. Naomi Rydell and Mayella Ewell are two different characters with many similarities. These two come from extremely similar families with no mother, and an abusive father.
From the crime to the trial, there are parallels between the crimes and trials. On March 25, 1931, a freight train was stopped in Paint Rock, a tiny community in northern Alabama, and nine young African American men who had been riding the rails were arrested. Two white women, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, descended from the freight cars, and accused the men of raping them on the train. As a result, the accused men were taken to the Scottsboro jail.
Going back to To Kill a Mockingbird, one night when Tom Robinson was locked up in jail, a mob, composed of those who you would consider good people and model citizens, attempted to lynch him. If it weren't for Atticus Finch, Scout Finch's father and Tom's defense attorney, and his brave act of sitting in front of the jail doors to try and protect Tom Robinson from the mass of people who were in pursuit of him, and Scout's unknown wisdom infused words, the flock most likely would have killed Tom. Scout brought to perspective what these people were about to do in relation to their everyday lives. It made them consciously process what they were about to do and how it could affect their lives, and to not just follow the crowd. In my opinion this
The Scottsboro Boys Case and To Kill a Mockingbird were cases of the injustice of black men. Harper Lee was trying to point out that a person 's skin color or race does not justify the actions they done, that anyone who practices prejudice is foolish. That prejudice is an actual reality that a person experiences first hand and hurts others in the process. Like Harper Lee with her father being a lawyer she must’ve experienced it first hand. These stories teach us that you shouldn’t judge a person by their race.
Growing up in Monroeville, a patriarchal small town in southwest Alabama during the Great Depression, Harper Lee witnessed discrimination. Such as segregation, and gender expectations like the Jim Crow Law and the Scottsboro Boys Case, where nine innocent young African-American men were wrongfully convicted of raping two white women and were sentenced to death. Furthermore, Lee's experiences with discrimination sparked empathy in individuals facing injustices which are portrayed in the novel by Scout, Jem, Calpurnia, and the Tom Robinson case. Scout is a determined individual who enjoys defying the gender expectations of being ladylike. Calpurnia is the black family's cook and a mother figure to the kids while having two kids of her own, nevertheless, both characters counterpoint the traditional gender expectations which are portrayed by Harper Lee because she was a tomboy growing up.
Lee uses Miss Gates’s ironic views of Hitler and Tom’s trial to show how racial prejudice causes crimes against African Americans to be considered less than crimes committed against white people. A mockingbird is then used to symbolize Tom Robinson as an innocent person wrongly convicted of a crime because of his skin color. The misunderstood characterization of Arthur Radley shows how society will let prejudice guide their imaginated view on the lives of people they don't understand. All three characters provide examples of how a preconceived opinion of one person or a whole race can cause drastic misunderstandings and
Discrimination in the South has a complex history from post-Civil War time (late 1800’s) up to the civil rights movement (1960’s). Lee sets her novel in the South of the 1930’s, conditions for the African Americans did not improve till the early 1960s. The Civil right movement started coming together in 1950s. The Civil Rights movement was inchoate and starting to become a voice for America's courtroom and lawrooms to be held buy.
Her story directly reflects the time of the 1960s and what Lee saw. She was done watching innocent people be convicted or killed because no one did the right thing so she did something about it. In Lee's story, she speaks using Atticus as a beacon for delivering lessons she thought
As can be seen, Lee’s usage of Tom Robinson’s trial and the racial discrimination and prejudice seen throughout it helps reinforce the theme of social injustice throughout To Kill A Mockingbird. Another encounter that the
There was no such thing as a fair trial for a black person during the time Harper Lee was writing her novel. As the oppressed, colored citizens of the 1930s south do everything they can to try and stand up for justice, the superior race--the whites--uses all its power to ensure nobody does anything to the fixed, unjust, status
Her novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, confirms the injustices of the male-dominated, racist culture of the pre-Civil Rights American South. Lee presents her protagonist,
She used these experiences from her childhood to create the protagonist Scout Finch. This novel shows a glimpse of Lee’s early life, thus building a relationship between the reader and text by proving that she saw all the injustices as those of the Scottsboro Trails. In the society Lee lived, people continuously assumed “…[when] it’s a white man’s word against a black man’s, the white man always [won]” and no one dared to correct it (Lee 295). She is showing that by living during those dark and painful years, she is knowledgeable of how different types of people were being treated. So Scout’s experiences throughout the novel showcase what it was like growing up in the South of Alabama during the 1930s.