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.
Leading up to the Civil Rights Movement, the black community was in a constant battle against law enforcement treating them unfair compared to the white community. The Scottsboro Boys and Emmett Till’s cases were one of the many times that the legal system showed to be unfair to blacks. In the book To Kill A Mockingbird, the law enforcement and community were very racist against blacks and believed all blacks were criminals. In the story, Atticus Finch, who is a lawyer gets put into a very difficult situation and decides to defend a black man, who went by the name of Tom Robinson.
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.
Likewise Trials Throughout the 1930’s, many accusations of rape were made against black males and brought up in court by white females. The Scottsboro Boys case (1931) and Tom Robinson’s case, from To Kill A Mockingbird, both represent how many of these cases played out. The Scottsboro Boys and Tom Robinson compare due to unfair trials and accusations held against them.
documents such as https://www.rjaffelaw.com/documents/Jaffe_History_Corrected_March_2014.pdf and https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/scottsboronine-black-youth-ar For example, the end of the first paragraph of rjaffelaw says, “A jury con- victed the youths simply because of their race at a time when no jury composed of all white males in a deep Southern state would reject a white woman’s uncorrobo- rated and unquestionably false testimony against a person of color no matter how unjust and absurd — even while the whole world watched”. This piece of information shows injustice against the boys because they were falsely accused based on race. But pbs org timeline during the trial “April 6: Ruby Bates appears as a surprise witness for the defense, denying that any rape occurred and testifying that she was with Victoria Price for the whole train ride. Her assertion that she and Price were with boyfriends the night before explains the presence of semen in their vaginas.
and it was really not that at all. There were roughly twenty women hanged and possibly more because of these false accusations. There were many more lives lost in vain. The Scottsboro Trial was different, these nine young black men were falsely accused of a crime they did not commit. After the American Communist Party took the case and the National Association for the advancement of the colored people joined with other Civil Rights organizations, eventually one of the white women came- forwarded to repudiate her testimony.
Most Americans 65% including majorities across racial and ethnic groups say it has become more common for people to express racism toward other ethnicities. Throughout this essay, there will be two examples of racism that will be discussed. Number one the Scottsboro trial and number 2 the To Kill A Mockingbird novel . These examples genuinely show the negative factors of racism.
To Kill a Mockingbird was written in relation to racial injustices that Lee had witnessed. Lee grew up in the 1930s and wrote To Kill a Mockingbird during the 1950s. When Lee was a child, a white woman near her hometown accused a black man of rape. The man that was accused was later found innocent but still spent time in prison. Also, the Scottsboro trial happened during the 1930s.
In writing To Kill a Mockingbird the author Harper Lee used real life events as a base for the novel. A few aspects of the book are racism, The Jim Crow Laws, and cases of mob mentality. The first connection to America’s actual history is the presence of the Jim Crow laws in the book. People thought the laws were needed as a way to “Keep the black population in check” (Pilgrim). This image showed racism in the large crowd of people who came to watch a lynching (V.).
Real life events have motivated Harper Lee to use in her novel To Kill a Mockingbird. There are connections to Jim Crow laws, mob mentality, and the issues of racism. The first connection to America’s actual history is the existence of the Jim Crow laws in the book. Jim crow laws were created to divorce black and white.
Tom Robinson’s trial in the novel was likely influenced by the Scottsboro trial. There is not only fear between blacks and whites but also within their own races. In Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Tom Robinson’s trial was based off of the Scottsboro trial in order
The Scottsboro Boys case assisted the Civil Rights Movement, the novel To Kill a Mockingbird was more or less based on their case (“The Scottsboro Boys"). Tom Robinson was based on the Scottsboro Boys. Harper Lee did this to show racial injustice in America. Despite the lack of evidence, both Tom and nine of the boys were convicted of the crime. Incorporating a real-life case into a nonfiction novel is a powerful stance on racial injustice in America.
Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird transports readers to Maycomb, a small town in Alabama during the great depression. Lee drew the inspiration for this story from the Scottsboro Boys Trial. The trial consisted of a group of black boys being sentenced to death on the accusation of rape by a white women, however all the boys were innocent. Moved by the injustice of the trail, Lee centered To Kill a Mockingbird around the theme of killing innocence. Throughout the book Lee repeatedly conveys innocence through a Mockingbird.
However, many of the events that happen throughout the novel relate to Lee’s childhood. Lee’s novel is loosely based on her own life. The Tom Robinson case in the book relates to a similar event that happened in her own hometown of Monroeville, AL. The Scottsboro case that occurred when Lee was just ten years old when nine African American men were falsely accused of raping two white women much like Tom Robinson was in the novel. Although the novel has many similarities Lee was influenced to write the novel by her own personal experience (“What influenced Harper Lee to write the novel To Kill a Mockingbird? –
One of many historical events that influenced Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird was the 1931 trial of the Scottsboro Boys. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee creates a court case based around a black man
