9th+Gd.+-+TKAM+Historical+Context+-+The+Scottsboro+Trials

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=== **__To Kill a Mockingbird __****Historical Context: The Scottsboro Trials ** === = = Tom Robinson's trial bears striking parallels to the "Scottsboro Trial," one of the most famous-or infamous-court cases in American history. Both the fictional and the historical cases take place in the 1930s, a time of turmoil and change in America, and both occur in Alabama. In both, too, the defendants were African-American men, the accusers white women. In both instances the charge was rape.

First, it is essential to understand the social and economic climate of the 1930s. The country was in what has been called the Great Depression. Millions of people had lost their jobs, their homes, their businesses, or their land, and everything that made up their way of life. In every American city of any size, long "bread lines" of the unemployed formed to receive basic foodstuffs for themselves and their families, their only means of subsistence.

The economic collapse of the 1930s resulted in ferocious rivalry for the very few jobs that became available. Consequently, the ill will between black and white people (which had existed ever since the Civil War) intensified, as each group competed with the other for the few available jobs. One result was that incidents of lynchings--primarily of African-Americans--continued. Here, lynching should be defined as the murder of a person by a group of people who set themselves up as judge, jury, and executioner outside the legal system. It was in such a distressing social and economic climate that the Scottsboro case (and Tom Robinson's case) unfolded.

Primary documents related to the case afford several avenues of comparison between the Scottsboro trials and Tom Robinson's trial in //To Kill a Mockingbird//. This is in addition to the more obvious parallels of time (1930s), place (Alabama), and charges (rape of white women by African-American men). First, the threat of lynching is common to both cases. Second, there is a similarity between the novel's Atticus Finch and the real-life judge James E. Horton, both of whom acted in behalf of black men on trial in defiance of their communities' wishes at a time of high feeling. In several instances, the words of the Alabama judge remind the reader of Atticus Finch's address to the jury and his advice to his children. Third, the accusers in both instances were very poor, working-class women who had secrets that the charges of rape were intended to cover up. Therefore, the veracity or believability of the accusers in both cases became an issue.

//Material abridged. //Johnson, Claudia Durst. //Understanding To Kill A Mockingbird. //The Greenwood Publishing, Inc. Wesport, CT:©1994.