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How Did Atticus Win The Trial In To Kill A Mockingbird

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How Did Atticus Win The Trial In To Kill A Mockingbird
-1 Racist, ignorant, lying southern folks convicted a black man for rape even though he did not do it… welcome to the early 1900’s. The events of the Scottsboro Boys, Emmett Till, Medgar Evers and many racially motivated murders and trials, gave Harper Lee the background for her novel. Just like in the Scottsboro Boys there was a man that was wrongly accused even though the “victim” said that the man never raped her and while trying to escape from prison was killed. In the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, set in the South during the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, Harper Lee provides an example of the need for a civil rights movement. Atticus, a white lawyer defending a black man, does not think that they can win the trial because there was no way you were going to get an all white jury to not convict a black man. Atticus even told his two kids, Jem and Scout that there was no way they would win the trial but there was no reason they couldn’t try to win. “‘Atticus, are we going to win it?’ ‘No, honey.’ ‘then why-’ ‘simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win,’ (p.76)”. In the end, Tom Robinson (the black man Atticus …show more content…
The court ended up believing their word simply because they were white and the accused man was black. Its defiantly not the first time this has happened, take the Scottsboro boys for instance two white women lied to get out of trouble and the boys got in trouble even though they did not rape the ladies. Mayella could not get her story straight on how Tom had raped, beaten and chocked her and was making the story up on the spot. ( ‘I ducked and it- it glanced, That‘s what it did. I ducked and it glanced off‘ Mayella had finally seen the light. ’ you’re becoming suddenly clear on this point. A while ago you couldn‘t remember too well, could you?’) (P.187). The Ewells aren’t only putting trouble on Tom Robinson but also on Jem and Scout

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