Two white women also told the posse that they had been raped by the young black men. These alleged rape victims were Victoria Price and Ruby Bates. Both women were examined within two hours by a medical physician who found neither of the women to have any cuts, bruises, or other injuries. Yet on March 31, all nine of the Scottsboro boys were indicted for the rapes. In the following weeks, eight of the boys were convicted and sentenced to death in the electric chair.
When Tom was accused of rape, this was the most racist point in the book to me. The people of Maycomb automatically labeled him as guilty. If I were in his position I would have wanted to fight back. Atticus Finch, a local lawyer and one of the main characters, is appointed as Tom’s lawyer. He is almost completely shunned from the town because he is trying to help a black man accused of rape.
Racism and prejudice inside and outside, same races, and schools still happen today. In the book To Kill a Mockingbird there was a lot of racism in and out of the schools. As we both know Tom Robinson was accused of rape from Mayella Ewell. But in the court room when the judge is speaking to Tom, we as an audience realize that he did not rape her. From her story to the scar nothing matches up to what she is saying, but because he had an all white jury, they found him guilty.
For it is a natural human instinct to stereotype. For centuries, we have been stereotyping different races such as the blacks. The whites used to see them as evil doers, but now we realize that it is not true. In the book, Tom Robinson was killed because he was stereotyped. If he had an impartial jury, he would have been a free man.
This movie reveals a sign of regress of our society because, most lynching incidents in America which occurred in public spaces and were usually the result of rape allegations involving black male supposedly assailants and white women who were purportedly their victims has not been seeing as a pure act of cruelty and hated from white supremacist calling for “justice”. A proof of this is that today, the noose appears in secluded areas such as school grounds and workplaces (Hyde Turner tragedy at work Conrald, Texas) as a result of racial tension in the U.S. Years after the Civil Right Movement, the battle for respect among all people regardless of the color of their skins and the end of racist organization or movement is far from over. A change has been operated but it is not enough to prevent such actions in the first democratic country of the world. In my opinion, the fact CNN host Kyra Phillips emphasize the importance that “youth people understand the horrors of the noose.” shows that American youth today are more sensitive about racial violence than previous generations of Americans. The essential reasons is because these major racial acts of violence occurred in the past so we should now be able to look at it from a clear, reasonably coherent and tolerant point of view in order to make these events stop.
It was the case of the Scottsboro boys in Alabama. The youngest defendant in this case was only 9 years old (class notes, 11/6/2012). “The 1931 trial in Scottsboro, Alabama, of nine black youths accused of raping two white women became a symbol of the injustices African Americans faced in the South’s legal system. Denied access to an attorney, the defendants were found guilty after a three-day trial, and eight were sentenced to death” (Henretta, [pg. 714]).
In New York City, an average of seven Latin Americans were killed a year between 1986 to 1989 but, in 1990, that number increased greatly. In that year, twenty three Latin Americans were killed by police gunfire. When asked how he felt about racism being involved in police brutality, Yussuf Naimkly of the University of Regina Commented: “Excessive police force against blacks has always been tolerated, because as a formally enslaved minority African Americans are trapped in a cultural context specifically designed to inhibit their development and thus minimize their threat to white hegemony”. Another shocking incident of police brutality occurred in Reynoldsberg Ohio. A group of offices named themselves “S.N.A.T” squad.
The court pleads the man guilty without any proof of rape. Had this been a white man instead the outcomes would have been different. When Tom Robinson was asked why he helped the “Victim” he answered “Looks like she didn't have nobody to help her. I felt sorry for her”(Lee chap 19-20). When Tom said those words the court couldn’t believe what they had heard.
Throughout the years racism has been a common problem and is happening all around us. In earlier times black people were used as slaves and did have little to no rights at all, but now discrimination between blacks and whites is illeagal and we are all supposed to have equal rights. Although the discrimination is illeagal it has happened in the judical system in the past that juries and other people have made their decision based on the defendants race. Like in the case of Tom Robinson from the book “To Kill a Mockingbird” and in the case of Stephen Lawrence the verdict seems to have been based mainly on their colors. So that leads me thinking if people of all races will ever be equal in the justice system and to the rest of the world.
Here are the statics: “Since 1989 when the first DNA exoneration occurred, 328 defendants have been exonerated in the United States after being convicted of serious crimes such as rape and murder. The exonerated were 316 men and 12 women; 145 of them were cleared by DNA identification and 183 by other kinds of evidence” (http://www.ur.umich.edu/0304/May10_04/25.shtml). What went wrong? * Eyewitness Misidentification * Improper Forensic Science * False Confessions * Overzealousness/Public Pressure Eyewitness Misidentification Imagine being a victim so frighten and traumatized after such a hideous unimaginable experience. It can be hard, almost impossible to accurately describe the assailant.