Comparing To Kill A Mockingbird And The Scottsboro Trial

In the novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, the trial in the novel is one of the most important incidents that takes place in the text. It is very important to our understanding of the text as a whole as it shows the racial discrimination in that time period of the 1920 – 1930’s and how society in the 20th century has improved and has become more accepting of different races throughout the world as a whole. The topics that will be discussed in this essay are the trial and how it represented a prejudiced society, what happened after the trial and the effects that the trial had on the children.

Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, based her book off the Scottsboro trial, a great American Tragedy. There are many similarities between the two -  from setting, the accused, the defendants, and the cases themselves.  When you delve a little deeper, these two stories, fiction and nonfiction, are greatly intertwined.

In the Scottsboro trial the victims were two girls, those two girls accused 9 black men of raping them. In The Salem witch trial the Abigail Williams and her friends accused more than 20 people of witchcraft. The two relate because of the girls accusing people they don't care about or if they were trying to go against them. In both of the trials the victims were not trustworthy when it came to reliability of what happened. “I say shut it, Mary Warren” says Arthur Miller, author of the book The Crucible. That quotes shows how Abigail Williams also had to rely on other girls when she accused people. In Scottsboro Alabama the illegally riding on the train black man got stopped by deputies in Scottsboro. The

There are many similarities between the Scottsboro trial and the trial of Tom Robinson in the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. “No crime in American history—let alone a crime that never occurred—produced as many trials, convictions, reversals, and retrials as did an alleged gang rape of two white girls by nine black teenagers on a Southern railroad freight run on March 25, 1931” (Linder 1). The author of To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee, was a young girl during the Scottsboro trial and based the trial of Tom Robinson in her novel off of the Scottsboro trial of 1931. The three main similarities between the Scottsboro trial and the trial of Tom Robinson are the geographic settings, the portrayal of racism, and the specifics of the court

The Scottsboro Trials exposed the racism of a courtroom when nine, young, innocent men were falsely accused of raping two white women and unjustly sentenced to death. The teenagers were sentenced to death after facing an

In 1931 two white women were riding the train along with the other men (the blacks and whites). When the fight broke out the blacks had won and let the white men off the train, however when the white men got off the train, they reported the incident to the local sheriff and that’s when the train stopped in Scottsboro, Alabama and everyone on the train was arrested. That’s how it all started in Scottsboro, Alabama and it was just the beginning of the case. The two women on the train Victoria Price and Ruby Bates were about to be in serious trouble because Ruby Bates was a minor and in that time it was a federal crime to take a minor across state lines for the reason of prostitution. The only way they could get of trouble in their situation was to say the black men raped them. In the time of 1931 rape was sanctioned by death. Usually they would’ve responded by a lynching, which was when they hung someone who was suspected of a crime, but for this case the citizens of Scottsboro wanted to hold a trial instead. The trial wasn’t fair at all because the outcome had been decided before the trial even

On March 25 1931 a group of nine boys were charged with raping two girls on a train traveling from Paint Rock Alabama. Several years later Harper Lee wrote her famous novel How To Kill a Mockingbird. In her story she made a character named Tom Robinson that was charged and accused of raping Mayella Ewell, it is an understanding parallel comparison between Tom Robinson and the Scottsboro case. Both Tom Robinson and the nine other boys race was presumed guilty before their trial. Harper Lee was convinced to making How To Kill a Mockingbird because she was a kid when the Scottsboro trial was happening and made comparison to the nine black boys to Tom Robinson, than Mayella Ewell to Victoria Price and Ruby Bates.

There were several trials held throughout the case of the Scottsboro Boys. Most of them were unfair and obviously conducted with the odds stacked against the boys. The testimonies given by the two girls often did not match up. Victoria Price spent the most time on the stand, and on the rare occasion that Ruby Bates testified, most of what she said was disregarded because it contradicted or changed Price’s story. It was concluded that anything Bates said was no good because she was dimwitted and could not keep her story straight.

I think that Harper Lee was inspired by the events of the Scottsboro Boys to write To Kill a Mockingbird based of the following evidence. Several of the characters in To Kill a Mockingbird are very similar to people that were involved in the Scottsboro Boys trials. The setting in a small Alabama town are similar and that both of the accoused rapes are both under similar circumstances that a black man was accused by a white women. This essay will be comparing characters from the book to real people from the Scottsboro Boys trials. Including Haywood Patterson, Tom Robinson, Victoria Price, Mayella Ewell, Samuel Leibowitz, and Atticus Finch.

The Scottsboro Trial and the trial of Tom Robinson are almost identical in the forms of bias shown and the accusers that were persecuted. The bias is obvious and is shown throughout both cases, which took place in the same time period. Common parallels are seen through the time period that both trials have taken place in and those who were persecuted and why they were persecuted in the first place. The thought of "All blacks were liars, and all blacks are wrongdoers," was a major part of all of these trails. A white person's word was automatically the truth when it was held up to the credibility of someone whom was black. Both trials were perfect examples of how the people of Alabama were above the law and could do whatever they

When the Scottsboro Boys case were finally proven innocent, it took the courage of not one, but several individuals. The case of the Scottsboro Boys was that two women, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price accused nine colored boys of rape. They were on a train going to look for work and when they arrived to the train station, the girls walked out of the bus and shouted, “rape!” When going to trial, one of the victims, Ruby Bates, came forward and said they accused the nine boys because they had broken a federal law. Both Ruby Bates and Victoria Price were prostitutes. Because it was a federal crime to cross state lines for illegal activity, they descended off the train, panicked, and accused the boys. Ruby Bates coming forward and saying that the boys were innocent and that she was guilty took courage. But her courage was not enough because the boys were still

   The trial of Tom Robinson is central to our understanding of racial and social prejudice in Maycomb. Harper Lee uses Tom Robinson's 'crime' to bring tensions in the town to a head and the author uses the trial as a way of making the ideas behind such tensions explicit for the reader.

There were pretty significant moments in this novel about the trial. People that took part in the trial had different testimonies such as Tom Robinson, Mayella Ewell, Bob Ewell, and Heck Tate. Heck claimed that after being contacted by Bob Ewell,he went to visit the Ewell home to find Mayella on the floor beaten. He said that he saw the right side of her face badly beaten with bruises near her neck. Bob claimed that he heard Mayella screaming within the Ewell house, and when he came inside, he saw Tom run away after seeing Bob. During Atticus' cross examination, furthermore, Bob consent with a request for Tom to write his name, which he did with his left hand. Mayella claimed that she offered Tom Robinson a nickel to ”bust up the chiffarobe,”

Firstly, when it came to color the blacks were accused more. According to the scottsboro trial, 9 Blacks were accused of raping two women on a train and two of the boys were only 13 years old with another crippled boy (Jessie) . Also in the book to Kill a Mockingbird Tom Robinson was accused of rapping Mayella and when he was a boy the got his hand caught in a cotton gin and it tougher all the muscles loss of his bone ( Lee, 248-249). In both of these cases tom and the scottsboro boys both were incapable of committing the crime because of the disabilities and age just because they were accused by white people.

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee and the Civil Right Movement demonstrates how doing the right thing is not always the easiest option. In the story To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee there are many things that show how doing the right thing is not always the easiest option such as, Atticus’s Actions to defend Tom Robinson are similar to MLK’s actions because they both knew that it would be hard to win their fights. “Atticus, are we going to win it?” “No, honey.” “Then why-” “Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started there is no reason for us not to try to win,” “Atticus said. Dr. King wanted to use nonviolent civil disobedience to beat racism and segregation.” That is how Atticus and MLK knew their fight would be hard