To Kill A Mockingbird By Harper Lee - This case is as simple as black and white - Examine how the trial of Tom Robinson exposes the depth of prejudice in Maycomb

Authors Avatar

“To Kill A Mockingbird”

By Harper Lee

“This case is as simple as black and white”

Examine how the trial of Tom Robinson exposes the depth of prejudice in Maycomb

        In this Essay, I will be focusing on the prejudice involved at the trial of Tom Robinson, while also exploring the depth of prejudice in Maycomb throughout “To Kill A Mockingbird”. The story is laden with prejudice, and in relation to the trial it is essentially racial prejudice. Harper Lee was born in 1926 in Monroeville Alabama, a city of about 7,000 people. Maycomb is a fictional town, but the layout is just like the layout in Monroeville, it has the courthouse, school, jail, and all the same roads and road names, further more, there was a similar house to Boo Radley’s in Harper Lee’s childhood. Both Maycomb and Monroeville are located in south Alabama that at the time had a lot of racial issues. It is said that Miss Lee personally resembles the tomboy she describes in the character of Scout. Atticus Finch is also said to bear a close resemblance to Harper Lee’s father, Amasa Coleman Lee, they are both Lawyers, and both have similar characters and personalities – humble, intelligent, hard-working, and overall good, valued citizens. Tom Robinson’s case is reminiscent of the case of the Scottsboro boys, nine young African-Americans form Alabama who were charged with raping two white women. Lee studied law in the university of Alabama from 1945-1949, so she may have studied this case and be writing about the case of Tom Robinson to expose the depth of prejudice in southern America at the time.

        When the trial is first mentioned in the book, Maycomb’s comfortable society begins to break down; the little ‘cocoon’ (as Jem calls it) that they live in begins to deteriorate. Everyone previously lived their own lives by the  ‘unwritten rules’ and conformities that were expected of them. However, the trial moves everything away from ‘the norm’ and starts to expose all of the hidden prejudices that were there but never thought about before. Because of things changing, people start to become scared; they fear what might happen and how it may affect them. They previously felt secure in their society because everybody knew where they stood and they all lived by a certain code. But Atticus Finch begins to attempt to rearrange their code, they start to become on edge and there is mention of mobs forming, even talk of the Ku Klux Klan being nearby. The Ku Klux Klan is a group, perhaps even a religion, made up entirely by white people who believe various ethnic groups, especially Negroes, to be inferior to them. The mobs are forming because they don’t know what to do about the Tom Robinson and because they fear the outcome, so they want to destroy him. They appear outside the county jail saying “You know what we want Mr. Finch”, they are planning on perhaps lynching him publicly to try and make people too scared to try and mess with the code again. You get the impression that the mob are only there because of the fear of this one case because Scout describes that they were “sleepy-eyed men who seemed unused to late hours”. By using the word “unused”, although in a slightly different context, it gives the reader the impression that they are unused to doing this sort of thing. The fact that Mr. Cunningham, who throughout the rest of the book seems to be a generally good-hearted man, is there to perform the lynching, this gives the impression that it is not a regular occurrence and just a “one off” because of the unique circumstances. The trial brings out some of the peoples real identities, before they lived in a sort of “dream world”, but when Tom Robinson begins to threaten their security, you begin to see what people are really like because they have to address an issue that hadn’t needed to be addressed before, the racism was always there, it was just not shown because everybody knew their place.

Join now!

        As soon as the word gets out that Atticus is going to be defending Tom Robinson, immediately the first mention of the trial begins to expose the racial prejudice in Maycomb because there is such a negative response from the community, even from the children at Scout’s school. The children at Scout and Jem’s school taunt them about their father being a ‘nigger-lover’ because he’s defending a black man. A lot of the children who call Atticus a ‘nigger-lover’ don’t even know what the phrase means, showing that they must have overheard their parents, or other Maycomb folk, talking ...

This is a preview of the whole essay