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.
In 1926 American society was changing rapidly through immigration and many races of people were bringing their cultures with them. A man named Hiram W. Evans was the imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Evans made the argument that these new immigrants were destroying the racial definition of what an American should be. He felt that true Americans were part of the Nordic race because the early pioneers fit into this category. The Klan’s point of view was that America should stay American and maintain this Nordic race of Caucasian people.
Uniquely, they ask questions, and then provide strong evidence to support their opinions on the matter or the claim. The tone of this book is mainly critical, the author introduces possible arguments to answer the questions at hand, and continues by refuting them and explaining why they are incorrect. In chapter 3, “How Is the Ku Klux Klan like a Giant Group Of Real-Estate Agents?” Levitt and Dubner mainly use the rhetorical strategy, pathos, when talking about the Ku Klux Klan because what person can disagree with someone proving how terrible a multi-state terrorist organization who’s purpose was to frighten and kill black people in the United States was? The answer is simple, no one, because most people have morals and are disgusted by what the Ku Klux Klan did.
On March 25, 1931 the lives of nine black teenagers changed after they were allegedly accused of being involved in a gang rape of two white females. This began when a fight broke out on a train after a white male named Orville Gilley stepped on the hand of a black male named Haywood Patterson who was hanging from the train itself (Linder, “The Trials of the Scottsboro Boys”). The white males involved went to a stationmaster to report the alleged assault which resulted with posse members coming to take the nine black males away. (Linder, “The Trials of the Scottsboro Boys”). Two white, female mill workers named Ruby Bates and Victoria Price also accused the nine black males to raping them.
In this novel, Ellison utilizes allusion, pathos, and figurative language to effectively write this story. Ellison alludes to what it was like to be black in America, Louis Armstrong, and Edgar Allan Poe. He grew up in a time when racism, segregation, and Jim Crow laws were in around. He constantly refers to himself as “blind” and “invisible” throughout the novel.
The Ku Klux Klan first emerged in Pulaski, Tennessee following the Civil War. As we know today, the mere mention of the Klan triggers fear as the KKK is known for its various tactics of violence that came in the form if lynchings, murders, and mutilations. Following their emergence, the KKK were quickly symbolized and portrayed as the protectors of the South, following the defeat of the Southern states in the Civil War and the beginning of the period of Reconstruction by the federal government (Gurr, 1989, p. 132). During the 1920s, the KKK achieved its greatest political success and growth outside of the South. During this period, the membership of the Klan heavily expanded to the states of Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Oregon, to which the KKK obtained two to two and one-half million members at its apex.
The story takes place at the height of the Civil Rights Movement in America, when desegregation is finally achieved. Flannery O’Connor’s use of setting augments the mood and deepens the context of the story. However, O’Connor’s method is subtle, often relying on connotation and implication to drive her point across. The story achieves its depressing mood mostly through the use of light and darkness in the setting.
In To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee teaches us about the town of Maycomb County in the late 1930s, where characters live in isolation and victimization. Through the perspective of a young Jean Louise “Scout” Finch, readers will experience prejudice Maycomb brings during times where people face judgement through age, gender, skin, and class. Different types of prejudice are present throughout the story and they all contribute to how events play out in the small town. Many of those in Maycomb face and express sexism, racial discrimination, and classism their whole lives. This disables the people who fall victim from living their life comfortably in peace.
Have you ever experienced a situation that involved racism? Maybe someone of a different race was treated unfairly or made fun of because they were of a different color. In To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, racism is a recurring theme because it dominates most of the events that take place in the novel. The book is a view of life in the town of Maycomb, Alabama in the 1930's. To Kill A Mockingbird is told through the eyes of Scout Finch.
Humans live in a world where moral values are very clearly set determining what is good and what is bad. We know what scares us and how racism should be treated. Nevertheless, this was not the case back in Alabama during the 1950s. In the famous novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee narrates the lives of the people of Maycomb, Alabama, focusing on the story of Scout and Jem Finch, and the case of a said to be rape. In this emotion filled narrative, readers learn how life was back then not only in general, but for the separate social statuses that there was.
In the novel: To Kill A Mockingbird, Mayella Ewell, a poor white woman, accused Tom Robinson, an African American, of rape. The Ewell’s are very indigent and her father, Bob Ewell, gets drunk and abuses Mayella. Since Mayella is very poor, this makes her not so powerful. In Maycomb, Alabama, A poor white woman named Mayella Ewell who lives behind the town garbage dump, accuses Tom Robinson, an African American, of rape.
In To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee teaches us about the town of Maycomb County during the late 1930s, where the characters live in isolation and victimization. Through the perspective of a young Jean Louise “Scout” Finch, readers will witness the prejudice that Maycomb produces during times where people face judgement through age, gender, skin colour, and class, their whole lives. Different types of prejudice are present throughout the story and each contribute to how events play out in the small town of Maycomb. Consequently, socially disabling the people who fall victim from living their life comfortably in peace. Boo Radley and his isolation from Maycomb County, the racial aspects of Tom Robinson, and the decision Atticus Finch makes as a lawyer, to defend a black man has all made them fall in the hands of Maycomb’s prejudice ways.
After watching her father fight hard for a case he was bound to loose, hearing all the mean names her family and Tom was called and hearing the news of Tom’s death she began to understand the reality of racism. “Just what I said. Grandma says it's bad enough he lets you all run wild, but now he's turned out a nigger-lover we'll never be able to walk the streets of Maycomb agin. He's ruinin' the family, that's what he's doin'.” (Lee, 110)
Again.” After Donald Trump was elected, hate crimes have increased all over the nation. Racism is a clear issue that dates back farther than the Reconstruction era. The Ku Klux Klan was famously known for hate crimes and has influenced them even to this day. The relationship between Reconstruction and today’s society intertwines with the subject of
In the autobiography “Black Boy” by Richard Wright, Richard learns that racism is prevalent not only in his Southern community, and he now becomes “unsure of the entire world” when he realizes he “had been unwittingly an agent for pro-Ku Klux Klan literature” by delivering a Klan newspaper. He is now aware of the fact that even though “Negroes were fleeing by the thousands” to Chicago and the rest of the North, life there was no better and African Americans were not treated as equals to whites. This incident is meaningful both in the context of his own life story and in the context of broader African American culture as well. At the most basic level, it reveals Richard’s naïveté in his belief that racism could never flourish in the North. When
