To Kill A Mockingbird Justice Quotes

Jackson Hedrick

Mr. Ellison

English 9, Honors

20 April, 2023

To Kill a Mockingbird Formal Essay Justice is not selective. Or at least that’s what we would like to believe that justice is supposed to look like, no one is exempt from punishment. But, when justice is left up to us humans to distribute, it can get very selective. This is very evident in To Kill a Mockingbird where we can clearly see the uneven distribution of justice in society, especially back during the 1920’s and 1930’s. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird shows that while justice will always exist, it often isn’t distributed fairly. Harper Lee shows this in the book through Mr. Ewell and Mayella’s reason to accuse Tom Robinson, Atticus’s closing argument about how

Ewell and Mayella’s reason to accuse Tom shows that they were actually a lot smarter than we previously thought. They had a foolproof plan on how to clear their names and sweep this whole situation under the rug. "Your father's no better than the ni***** and trash he works for!" (Lee 117) This quote shows that the people in Maycomb, and in general back then, acted like you had to lower yourself to even speak to black people. So, for two white people to accuse a black man of rape was basically a garunteed win in court. “What did your father see in the window, the crime of rape, or the best defense to it?” (Lee 213) Atticus, being the moral superhero that he is, is one of the only people to see past the barrier of race and see the situation for what it is. Throughout the book, all of the evidence in the case points to Tom being innocent, but nobody can see past what is on the surface. He was merely a scapegoat being used by Mr. Ewell to try and cover up his own

“I don’t know, but they did it. They’ve done it before and they did it tonight and they’ll do it again and when they do it—seems that only children weep.” (Lee 243) Society is the way it is and you can’t change it. And sometimes it looks like only people who care to try and change it are the ones who don’t know that. Racial injustice will always exist in some capacity, someone will always think that they’re better than someone else for some stupid reason and the only people who treat people truly equal are children and people who are smart enough to look past their own ignorance and see deeper than a person's skin color. We need to adopt a more childish-like mind when it comes to judging people, especially in our courts, unless we want more instances like Tom’s case. “No suh, I’s scared I’d be in court, just like I am now…No suh, scared I’d hafta face up to what I didn’t do.” (Lee 225) Tom was aware of the injustice that he would face if these accusations reached the court. He knew that despite all of the evidence stacking up in his favor, the people of Maycomb wouldn’t see past his skin color and they would hate him from the minute they saw