Harper Lee's Story and Scottsboro
A classic story and a contraversal trial compared
Scottsboro
The Scottsboro case involved nine young black men who are falsely accused of raping two white women. They lived in the south, and if you know the south in the 1930's, racial bias is everywhere! They were involved in four trials before they were let go. The two women's names were Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, Price coached Bates to accuse them, and Bates later she said it was a lie in court. In one of the trials Price refused to answer some questions, and it sounded like she was lying to the court after taking the oath. One lie that she told was that she was in a boarding house with a person named Callie, the thing is though, Callie is a fictional character from stories in the newspaper. Bates went on the stand after her to come forward and say this was all a lie and Price was knowingly committing purgory, but the jury didn't listen to her testimony and convicted the boys of rape based on their racial bias! The communist party did everything they could to release them including protests and rallies. While they were in prison for those years, they turned on each other, hit each other and did bad things to other people in jail, the prison personality must have struck them. But it would soon be over, the boys were freed, but some did very bad things and were executed for their crimes, one of them was accused of rape again by another woman! The only one who made a life for himself was Clarence Norris, he was given a pardon, freeing him from the case entirely! The men were never killed for this crime, nor did they escape prison! They were released one by one over a span of a few years, Heywood Patterson was the last to get out of the jail for the crime.
Scottsboro Boys
These are the nine men accused by Victoria Price and Ruby Bates.
Ruby Bates and Victoria Price
These are the two women who falsely accused the nine boys of raping them to save themselves from saying they were hobos on a train with negroes!
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee's classic story has a lot of critical moments, but the most critical of them all is Tom Robinson's Trial! Unlike Scottsboro however, there was only one man instead of nine, and one woman instead of two. They only had one trial full of two fake testimonies and one real one! The entire trial happens in one day having Atticus Finch as the lawyer for Tom Robinson. In the beginning, they know they are going to lose (because of the religious racial bias). The court case starts in the 17th chapter of the text, and the testimonies we hear in the story are interesting. Reading the text, the testimony from Mayella Ewell from how she acts and what she says is easy to point out that she is in fact lying to the court, just like Victoria Price. Price and Ewell accused the men to save themselves from the guilt of being with these black men. Price did it because the train with the negroes was the only one she could afford to ride with Bates. Mayella accused Tom because she lured him in and got on him and kissed him, trying to seduce him. To get over the guilt of doing this, she accused him of raping her. Tom Robinson didn't have any party backing him except for Atticus and his family as well as neighbors that lived around them. He was convicted of rape as planned, however, unlike the boys, he escaped from prison and was killed, shot over seventeen times!
Tom Robinson
Tom is accused by Mayella after she tries to seduce him and feels gulit for doing so.
Mayella
Mayella Violet Ewell accuses Tom to save herself from the guilt of seducing a black man
Atticus Finch
Tom Robinson's lawyer who tries to save him by giving amazing closing arguments, but the beliefs of the jury overrule it