Essay about The Scottsboro Trials and To Kill A Mockingbird

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

According to American history, prejudice is shown through the courtroom’s jury when making decisions to send the alleged African Americans to jail. On March 24, 1931, nine African American lives were jeopardized with the false accusations of rape that further scrutinizes the nation’s controversial look upon justice. Referring to Abigail Thernson and Henry Fetter when talking about The Scottsboro Trials it states, “Represented by unprepared out of date counsel who had no more than a half an hour consult

There was an event in To Kill a Mockingbird that showed discrimination for a breed of man. As depicted in the book, Tom Robinson was being accused of raping a young lady by the name of Mayella Ewell. Tom Robinson was a middle aged black man. Mayella Ewell is a white girl. This was very distraught because of the fact that this was the time that whites were superior over any other minority. Tom was being held in a cell waiting for the trial to commence. Atticus Finch, the lawyer of Tom Robinson, decided to take a trip to the jail in which he was being held in. As he arrived, a squadron of cars pulled up. A group of white men stepped out of the vehicles and walked up to the jail in a sort of formation. These men had showed up on this afternoon to lynch Tom Robinson. Luckily, Scout Finch started talking to one of the men, Mr. Cunningham. She said,” Tell him [Walter] hey for me, won’t you?”. His son’s name was Walter Cunningham. He ended up feeling bad for what he was going to do, and called the men back. They did not end up lynching Tom. This connects to what happened in

The boys of the Scottsboro trials were never treated fairly from the beginning. The whole journey was filled with misconception. The journey began on the freight train, there was nine African Americans on a train car and with them, was a group of Caucasian men. It all started with one of the white males stepping on the hand of one of the blacks. Not too long after, the white males threatened the nine boys to leave the train car (Doc). After the nine black males refused their threat, a fight broke out between all of them. All of the members of the white group were thrown off the train, all, but one. The one that was left on the train went and reported the fight to the train conductor.

The two cases also involved lynch mobs. Scottsboro had large masses of people waiting for the boys outside the jail waiting to lynch them. It got so out of hand. The National Guard was called in to hold off the crowds. It was a much more controlled situation in Lee’s novel, involving only a small group of men threatening outside the jailhouse and Atticus Finch keeping guard. The National Guard was not called in, but Scout did successfully ward off the men with her innocent charm. Overall, the public reactions of these cases were similar, except for the fact that the Scottsboro case drew much more extreme responses. While most of the white people at the time of the Scottsboro case called for the death penalty, most of the white people in “Mockingbird” were generally indifferent about Robinson’s outcome, only caring about its affect on their black employees.

The Scottsboro boys were nine African American teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women on a train in Alabama during the year 1931. No crime in American history that never occurred has produced as many trials, convictions, and retrials as the alleged gang rape of two white girls by nine black teenagers did. This tragedy marks a time in the United States where African Americans were not receiving the right to a fair trial and encountering racism because of their skin color. This court case is seen as one of the major examples that one innocent person or in this case many innocent people have been convicted and punished for a crime they did not commit.

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.

All of the boys’ trials were suspiciously speedy and did not last more than a few days. There was only one lawyer for all nine of the boys. The lawyer was not trustworthy and he was seventy-one years old. Also, there was minimal or no proof that the boys had raped the girls and there, of course, was an all white jury. In the case Powell v. Alabama, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the convictions because the defendant had not received a legal counsel, the trial was not fair, and there were no blacks on jury. It claimed that this case violated the 6th and 14th amendments (6th being the right to counsel in trials and the 14th is prohibiting states from denying the rights of people without Due Process of Law). This was the same for Norris v. Alabama. The convictions ruling was that the state had excluded blacks from the jury, which is a violation of the 14th amendment. Besides all of these Due Process violations, one of the girls did admit that there was no harm that occurred, and no one was raped. Although, this did not matter or change the opinion of what should happen to the Scottsboro

In both the case of Tom Robinson and the real life version of the Scottsboro boys, we see that justice is denied to African Americans because the jury consists of only white. The day of the Scottsboro trial, when the jury was discussing the final verdict, the sheriff had a talk with the doctor who examined the girls and the jury didn’t do much investigation. Klarman states, “It later came out that Sheriff Wann had warned Norris that he would be killed if he did not admit that the girls had been raped”(Klarman 160). This quote demonstrates that the trial wasn’t the best since it later came out that the doctor lied which meant that the jury didn’t do much to investigate. This shows that the jury didn’t want the boys to win the trial

The Scottsboro trial of the 1930’s is still one of the most famous racial cases today. It impacted the legal system and changed the course of history for years to come. It has even influenced and inspired literary work such as Tom Robinson’s case in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. The similarities between the Scottsboro case and Tom Robinson’s case heavily outweigh the differences. Thus it can be concluded that without the Scottsboro case To Kill a Mockingbird would not have the storyline readers know today.

   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.

The world is a big place with many different groups of people. Some get along, but some don’t. What would one do when these groups are in conflict? Would they take a man from the opposing group and make them suffer for months or maybe years? Would they give him a chance to get back his freedom only to be thwarted no matter how close he was? That might sound like the plot of the popular book, To Kill a Mockingbird, but it is also the story of nine young men in Scottsboro, Alabama who lived through To Kill a Mockingbird’s tragic racial prejudice. In Maycomb and Scottsboro, the trials put many ethical and societal norms into question. The trials were affected by the racial prejudice that the lawyers of the defense tried to question.

April 1931, when Harper Lee was just a little girl nine african american boys were accused of rape by two women Victoria Price and Nancy Bates out of fear who were illegally riding a train and riding it without a male escort. After growing up and writing Toms trial, Lee based it off of the Scottsboro Trial. The two trials were very much alike, I'm comparision with both lawyers were alabama lawyers, both black men were accused of rape, around the same time period as in the 1930s. The people in both of these towns looked down upon them because they were black.

In Harper Lee’s classic, To Kill A Mockingbird, “Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed” (Lee, 245). As To Kill A Mockingbird takes place in the 1930’s, for a white woman to accuse a man of color of committing a crime would mean that the man has been declared guilty before they are given a chance to defend themselves, leading to false convictions. Even if they were to be given the chance to try to save themselves from an unjust verdict, the juries normally consisted of white men, consequently leading to an inevitable conviction. With Tom Robinson being a black man and Mayella Ewell being a white woman, this was the reality for Tom when he was accused of raping Mayella. With this accusation, it became very clear who exactly had been infected with “Maycomb’s usual disease”(Lee, 91) especially Bob Ewell, Mayella’s father. Racism and injustice are both heavy influences in To Kill A Mockingbird as the story takes place in 1930 where many white people had racist views towards people of color, giving white people a higher status in Maycomb County, Alabama, thus giving them more power than people of color. This played a large role in one of the bigger conflicts in the story with Bob Ewell and Tom Robinson as the two men hold to different social statuses showing everyone their true colors. Throughout the novel we are presented with numerous quotes showing how Tom Robinson and Mr. Bob Ewell acted before the trial and how the trial has showed us what their true intentions are.