To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Racism has been a large part of history, To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, demonstrates the lives of people during highly racial times in the south. One case in the story was a case involving a black man named Tom Robinson, who was wrongly accused of rape. The story also brings to light the separate areas for blacks and whites in Maycomb, Alabama on many different instances. During one part of the novel it talked about a man by the name of Dolphus Raymond who is looked at differently in the town because he chooses to live with the black community. During the Jim Crow Era, laws were passed to keep blacks and whites separate and in many different cases, To Kill A Mockingbird demonstrates this separate and unfair treatment. Years later the Civil Rights Era sparked and created a movement for equality for all and a change in the relationship between blacks and whites. To Kill A Mockingbird had many racial and gender prejudices that raised racial tension. Racism is still a large problem in America today and many of the problems happening today can be related to Lee’s story in cases that are happening in the south just as Lee wrote about.

Throughout the Jim Crow Era, racial discrimination was major factor of this time period. During the Jim Crow Era, laws were created after the abolishment of slavery to keep whites superior. To do this, laws were passed that segregated blacks and whites. One of those laws being that blacks and whites couldn’t marry each other (Rasmussen). There were times that “until the passage of the federal civil rights acts of the 1960s, virtually all public eating places in the south were segregated” (Rasmussen 9). In the South, segregation was a lot more prominent. Many of the issues that were shown in this time period were separate public buildings. Also, in many different cases throughout history black children were found guilty of crimes that children were unlikely of doing. An example of a case like this would be the case of the Scottsboro Boys. The case was later found not true because, “to southern whites, these nine African-American teenagers had inflicted the gravest of injuries-rape- on two white girls...However, as the facts of the case became a ‘free the Scottsboro Boys’ became rallying cry for the popular front, the civil rights movement…” (Bush). These boys were all young teenagers who meant no harm to society, but because during time the jury they would be tried under would be all white males, and no black person ever stood a chance of being innocent in court, the boys were found guilty. They were found guilty for a crime they didn’t do. The story To Kill A Mockingbird, allows readers an insight in the trial of a black man during the times of the Jim Crow Laws in the South.

As a trial is underway for a black man during the times of the Jim Crow Era, there is no chance that the black man would come out innocent. Tom Robinson was a black man who was wrongly accused of a crime he did not do. When a young girl testified against Tom Robinson in court she too said that she raped him when really “ ‘She was white and she tempted a negro, she did something that in our society is unspeakable...She kissed a black man’ “(Lee 272). When the evidence in the court was provided to a jury of all white men and the evidence proved that there was no way Tom Robinson could have raped and beaten this white girl, he was still found guilty. The jury took a white man’s lies and used it to put Tom Robinson in Jail for a crime he didn’t commit just like the Scottsboro Boys. Events such as the Scottsboro boys and the segregated communities caused tensions between blacks and whites to rise, leading to the civil rights era.

The Civil Rights era caused racial and gender discrimination to continue to grow. There were many groups that tried to stop racial discrimination because “ During the early decades of the 20th century, movements to resist such racial and gender discrimination gained strength in many countries” (“African Americans and the law”). During the Civil Rights era, segregation stopped and congress passed many laws. With the positivity of the movement of the end of segregation, came the rise of a group known as the Ku Klux Klan. “The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is an organization that formed in the South after the American Civil War. Its members believed strongly in the superiority of whites over other races. They work to insure that the freedom of blacks do not threaten the social advantages of whites.” (“Ku Klux Klan”). With all the new advantages of equality for all, there were people who still didn’t agree with it. The KKK was an example of this and because of that many of the members would act out violently to scare the blacks. There were similar examples of what life was like in the Civil Rights Era in the book To Kill A Mockingbird.

The Book To Kill A Mockingbird talks a lot about racial and gender discrimination