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Tom Robinson Court Case

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During the early to mid 1900s there was a lot of racism, especially in the southern United States. This is expressed more inside the court cases of the time. While lots of these ended poorly for defendant, it was often because of the color of their skin, not because they were guilty. In fact many times the defendant was actually innocent.
The book To Kill a Mockingbird takes place during this time and even has a court case in it. This case is the case of Tom Robinson vs Bob Ewell. This case may be fictional, but it shows the racism that took place in that time period. Tom Robinson was a black man who was accused of raping and beating Bob Ewell’s daughter Mayella. There was a lynch mob that went after Tom, but was stopped by the main character, …show more content…

There are many similarities between the two court cases including the false accusation of rape, the involvement of a lynch mob, the fact that many times they were proven innocent, and that they were all very young. I’ve observed that false accusations of rape was very common in these types of trials, mostly because it was a very serious crime in the southern half of the United States, where racism was very common. Several times after the defendant is proven guilty, someone will come out and say that they were innocent, but often times it is too late for the accused. Most of this type of trial frequent lynch mobs and not just after, but they will try and get to them before they are even tried. Many of these cases are ended by a confession. These are very often times false confessions and the people are just trying to get off easy and go to jail without causing people trouble. But the false confession just riles up the crowd way more than needed and the accused just ends up getting killed.
The boys were very lucky in only getting jailed for a small amount of time and weren’t found by any sort of mob. Tom was also lucky in the fact that he didn’t get attacked by the mob, but he never got to see his family again after he was imprisoned. The case of the Scottsboro Boys was a very large contribution to the abolishment of Jim Crow laws and Tom’s fictional case was there to show how bad racism was back during the

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