Similarities Between the Scottsboro Boys and Tom Robinson Essay

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,

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

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.

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

Harper Lee's childhood was troubled with many of society's racial issues especially a trial in Alabama referred to as the Scottsboro trial of 1931. Lee was only five years old when the trial occurred but she was deeply affected by the trial. Amasa Lee was a lawyer and so he became very interested in the trial like many other people in the community, which lead to Lee being interested. The trial in the book, Tom Robinson's rape case, is a reflection of

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

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,

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.

A chapter on Harper Lee's now-classic To Kill a Mockingbird deiûy analyzes the novel's ideological contradictions, showing that Lee's insistent locaLIsm at once acknowledged the continuing impact of the Scottsboro Narrative and undermined its significance as a register to the injustices of the American legal system. In a trenchant epILogue. (Foley 768)

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 Harper Lee was writing about the trial of Tom Robinson in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” she had a very real case to look to for inspiration. The trial of the Scottsboro Boys was a world renowned case in the 1930’s in which nine black youths were accused of raping to white girls in Alabama. Lee’s novel took this case and created the fictional case of Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a lower class white girl in a small town in Alabama during the Depression-era. The Scottsboro trials were the main source of inspiration for Lee’s novel, and although the circumstances of the novel differed from the real-life scandal, the similarities between the two cases are quite abundant.

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