Courtly Racism: The Deep South

"A jury never looks at a defendant it has convicted, and when this jury came in, not one of them looked at Tom Robinson. The foreman handed a piece of paper to Mr. Tate who handed it to the clerk who handed it to the judge....

I shut my eyes. Judge Taylor was polling the jury: "Guilty...guilty...guilty...guilty..." I peeked at Jem: his hands were white from gripping the balcony rail, and his shoulders jerked as if each "guilty" was a separate stab between them."



Despite all the hard evidence that showed TR was innocent, the jury still decided to convict him. But this is to be expected, because it was a different time and place. In Alabama, racism was rampant, despite government efforts to end it.

The South resented the freedom of black people for many reasons. The South's economy had been reliant on slaves, their greatest source of income. After all, it created free labor for them, and harvesting and production were much faster. As a result, many plantation owners were extremely rich, until their slaves were freed.

Afterwards, the economy went down the drain, rendering the South poor and weak. When white landowners saw the newly freed African-Americans setting up lives for themselves, acts of violence were pressed against the new society members. The federal government stopped this for a while, but eventually, the South gained power and began to do what it wanted.

African-Americans were attacked savagely as the lowest members of society. They had limited rights and had difficulty getting a fair trial.

And that was where the court scene from TKAM came in. Despite the fact any idiot could see that Robinson was innocent, he was voted guilty by an all-white jury. Mr. Ewell, although being the poorest white person in town, was still greater than TR.

In Race and Justice: Wrongful Convictions of African American Men, author Martin D. Free, Jr. catalogued 350 wrongful convictions and found that a disproportionate number involved black men accused of crimes against white victims.  One such incident is the story of Jennifer Thompson-Cannino and Ronald Cotton, which took place in North Carolina.  Jennifer was raped by a man who looked very similar to Ronald, and her eye witness account pointed to him.  He was convicted and put in prison for eleven years.  He was later freed when he took a DNA test to prove he was not the rapist. Jennifer and Ronald are now close friends, and they wrote a memoir called Picking Cotton about their experiences to help educate people about wrongful conviction and racial discrimination.



This event from TKAM shows a black man accused of raping a white woman, then being wrongly convicted by an all-white jury.  We can tell he was innocent because his left arm was disabled, meaning that he could not have beaten Mayella Ewell on the right side of her face.  Tom Robinson should have been set free, based on this evidence.  However, Tom became a victim by being wrongfully convicted.