Race In A Time To Kill

In the movie A Time to Kill, money and its influence plays a part in the way the characters, especially Jake Brigance and Carl Lee Hailey, act throughout the movie. We the viewer see the way money relates to the status and power we see through the characters in the movie and in our daily lives. There is the underlying factor of money and how it affiliates with race. We see how race, though different from money and power, plays a role and influences how a person gains their income and status in society, whether we’d like to admit it or not. It starts off with the rape of a young black girl, the daughter of Carl Lee Hailey, who “loses her innocence” to two white men in the South. This epitomizes the hatred of blacks by the whites in the South,
We see that the jury is full of the middle class white men in the community, and so Brigance asks for a change in venue in order to add color to the jury and give Hailey a chance. Though once again the chance for a somewhat fair trial is turned down by the very men who don’t live like Carl Lee Hailey. Even Carl Lee realizes he is not going to receive a fair trial and tells Brigance that the only reason he could win is for the fact that Brigance is white. And for the first time in the movie we see that their differences for once are realized, but only brings them to the same page. Brigance thinks like the whites do, and in turn knows their angle and how to get across to him, since he subconsciously thinks in other ways than Carl Lee. The race of Brigance turns the already biased jury towards empathy and a final decision of not guilty. I find this significant in the fact that it resembles a possible change in heart for every person who sees color instead of a man. An overall, representation of how society, though cracked and biased, there is a hope for change no matter how big the problem may
We can infer that Brigance has a fair amount of money, though slow on clients, he is able to update his house and still provide for his wife and daughter. Especially as a white man in the South he has an automatic advantage in what class he associates with in society. When we see Carl Lee at home we see he has fewer resources as a black man in the South. Carl Lee is on the bottom of the totem pole, with a low paying job, and we see that he can’t even afford Brigance. As the trial starts we see that Carl Lee’s low paying job will not allow him to afford a “high class” attorney that would provide him more resources. Brigance says a case like Carl Lee’s would cost about $50,000 and only receives $900 from him. A low class proletariat like Carl Lee offers him little resources and a fairly new attorney who is still without the resources. The prosecutor has the seemingly unlimited resources in the law and