Similarities Between the Scottsboro Boys and Tom Robinson Essay

The Scottsboro trials are related to the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, because of the false accusations

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.

One of the most important cases in the history of the judicial system is little known in the modern world. The case of the Scottsboro Boys made headlines in early 1931 when nine African-American men were charged with the gang rape of two white females on a freight train from Chattanooga to Memphis. Since the time of the trial, it has become widely accepted that the allegation was false and that no rape actually occurred. However, the case represents an issue greater than itself, one that is explored similarly in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee through the case of Tom Robinson. The issue of large scale racism and discrimination has been a problem plaguing American culture for a very long time, finally becoming an issue of the

Racism played a big role in both Tom Robinson and the Scottsboro Boys trial. Racism led both cases to end with the same conclusion. Despite Atticus and Samuel tenaciously proving that the men were not guilty, for instance, Tom Robinson had a bad arm, which he could not have possibly hit Mayella with and many of the Scottsboro boys had their own physical weak points, the men were still wrongly convicted. Since the beginning when Tom Robinson and the Scottsboro boys first stepped foot into the courtroom their fates had already been sealed. They would be trialed unfairly because they were African American men being accused of raping white women "they couldn’t be fair if they tried. In our courts when it’s a white man's word against a black mans,

He was put on trial for the rape and beating of Mayella Ewell. Atticus Finch defended Robinson in the trial and had proven beyond reasonable doubt that Robinson was innocent. However, the jury was all white and not made up of Robinson’s peers. The citizens of Maycomb county failed to uphold Robinson’s constitutional rights to a fair trial and put an innocent man in jail. The jury of this case knew Tom Robinson was innocent, but because of him being an African-American they decided on a guilty verdict. Many real cases went this way, including the Scottsboro Trials. The case in To Kill a Mockingbird was actually based on the Scottsboro Trials. However, the trials had many differences. In the Scottsboro Trials, nine young, unemployed African-American men who were falsely accused of raping two white women aboard a train. On March 25, 1931, Charlie Weems, Ozie Powell, Clarence Norris, Olen Montgomery, Willie Roberson, Haywood Patterson, Eugene Williams, and Andrew and Leroy Wright were charged with raping Ruby Bates and Victoria Price. These two white women were pressured to say they were raped by the Scottsboro Police Department. The only actual crime the nine had committed was illegally boarding the train. The charge of a black man raping a white woman is a huge charge. The nine were convicted of a crime they did not commit and eight of them were sentenced to death. The youngest, Leroy Wright (13), was sentenced to life in prison. One could imagine themselves in Leroy’s shoes and how traumatizing it would be to be sentenced to life in prison at that young of an age. This verdict was decided within two weeks by an all white jury fueled by the Alabama media. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) would eventually join forces with the American Communist Party (ACP) despite initial reluctance. Together, these two political powerhouses would set the stage for the

The Scottsboro Trial and the Tom Robinson Trials are so complicated because of all the false events and lying involved. Harper Lee had the idea to make the book To Kill a Mockingbird from the real world events like Scottsboro trials with the Tom Robinson trial.

In both novels, the authors deal with the concept of justice. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus is the lawyer for a black man who has little chance of being proven innocent. In the time period in which the story takes place, no man would ever vote a white man to be guilty if a black man could carry the burden for him. This was exactly the case in Tom Robinson’s trial, he was declared guilty of the Rape of Mayella Ewell. However, due to Atticus’s convincing case, he was able to make it known that Tom was not actually the one who committed rape, all evidence pointed to the fact that it was actually Robert Ewell who raped his daughter. Mr. Ewell was, as one could assume, quite displeased with this common verdict that the town seemed to accept.

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 wanted to

Lee wants to make explicit the consequences of racism and to guide the reader's judgment of this episode in the novel. She accomplishes these goals, in part, by employing Tom Robinson's trial to allude to the famous "Scottsboro Boys" trials of the 1930s. These trials featured nine black defendants accused of rape by

The Scottsboro Boys are an important part of the novel To Kill a Mockingbird. The most important facts in the arrest and accusations of the Scottsboro Boys are when the boys were first arrested for assault after the fight broke out on a train, Victoria Price, a white woman that had been involved in the fight, had accused six of the boys of gang raping her, and that the law concluded that the other boys had to have been involved, and Ruby Bates, the other white woman entangled in the fight on the train, was presumably raped also. Once the fight broke out, most of the white boys on the train were thrown off. Which lead the black boys being detained in Paint Rock, Alabama for assault and taken to Scottsboro, Alabama. Once they had begun the trial,

The Scottsboro Trials opened the eyes of blacks and whites to the racist legal system of the 1930’s. Nine African-Americans, known as the Scottsboro Boys, were accused of raping two white women. These young men were riding freight trains illegally to find better work. Officials with guns searched the train for any black youth, rounded them up, and took them to

When first reading the book, To Kill a Mockingbird, the importance of social and historical context is immense. The magnitude of social inequality in this book relates to what was happening during that time period. The prejudice of what happened to Tom Robinson links to what occurred to the Scottsboro boys because both were convicted based on their skin color and not on the evidence. At that time, people hated anyone whose skin color wasn’t white. The evidence is clear whether its segregation, inequitable court rooms, and this is why the jury disregarded the evidence and sentenced Tom Robinson for something that he didn’t do.

In Monroeville, Alabama, Harper Lee was born in 1926, and modeled her Maycomb after the town. The culture of the people, the social dynamic, was modeled after that of her own home town. Even the trial of Tom Robinson was based off of a trial on the rape of two white women by nine black men, that occurred in Scottsboro when Lee was five years old. Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird is an example of social inequality between races, as the author uses the trial of Tom Robinson to convey her support of equality.

We are now aware of Ruby Bates (17), Victoria Price (21), and Mayella Ewell (the oldest of her siblings), all three of these women come from unstable homes and different walks of life. To the people who truly know them , they are all women who are out of jobs or have indulged themselves in many sexual activities, but to the people who don't know them quite well enough, consider these women to be honest and automatically have the right-of-way in their cases due to the color of their skin. It seemed like Harper Lee left us with all the information and answers to her superb book “To kill a mockingbird”, but it can be argued about whether Harper Lee answered questions as to whether or not she based the book off the historical Scottsboro incident. I feel that because of the similarities between the fictional and historical female characters, the fictional and historical male characters,and also the similarities between the evidence given in the fictional and historical trials, all point to how Harper Lee certainly based her novel off of the Scottsboro trial.

The first similarity of the trials is the role of racism in the outcome of the trials. In To Kill a Mockingbird, racism plays a huge role on the outcome of the trial. The novella takes place in a time period when black people were treated like objects rather than humans. Since it was a black man going being prosecuted by white citizens and having his fate be decided by an all white jury, Tom Robinson’s chances of being decided rightfully innocent are very slim. This is shown when Atticus states, “‘There's something in our