Scottsboro Trial Essay

Speaking of racism, the Scottsboro Trials and other racist behaviors displayed by Caucasians in the South have many parallels to what happened in To Kill a Mockingbird. For the most part, the Scottsboro Trials were a series of trials for a group of African American teens who apparently raped two white women who were in a train car with them riding from Tennessee to Alabama (Johnson). Eventually, the juries convicted the men despite substantial amounts of evidence to the contrary (Anderson). Specifically, there were witness accounts that showed that the men were not even in the same train car as the women, medical evidence which showed that there were no indicators of rape on the women, and reports that the women were in fact known prostitutes, which means they faced charges for crossing state lines for immoral purposes
With white supremacists in places of power, things rarely got better for African Americans implicated with a violation of the law. Many of the major events within To Kill a Mockingbird shared surprising similarities with the Scottsboro Trials. Clearly, the Robinson trial itself had the same basic structure as the Scottsboro Boys’ trial. Both Mayella and the two women from the Scottsboro Trials alleged that the African Americans in question raped them (Anderson) (Durst) (Lee 204-206). Moreover in both cases, the defendants could not have possibly committed the crime, due to some pre-existing circumstance; such as the shredded arm for Tom and the separate train car for the Scottsboro Boys (Anderson) (Durst) (Lee 211). Finally, in both cases, the juries found the defendants guilty on charges of rape (Anderson) (Durst) (Lee 240). The stark similarities between the two trials shows that racism was prevalent in Maycomb, like any real Southern