Courtly Racism: Part Two

"Jem seemed to be having a quiet fit. He was pounding the rail softly, and once he whispered, "We've got him." 

I didn't think so: Atticus was trying to show, it seemed to me,that Mr. Ewell could have beaten up  Mayella. That much I could follow. If her right eye was blacked and she was beaten mostly on the right side of her face, it would tend to show that a left-handed person did it."

In this excerpt from the book, Mr. Ewell  had just testified. Saying that he agreed with the injuries the sheriff described, he signed a piece of paper at Atticus' request, with his left hand. Later, when TR was told to stand up, everybody could see that his left arm was crippled, proving that he couldn't have beaten the right side of Mayella's face. And while that was the best evidence against the thesis that TR was guilty, it still pretty much proves he was innocent. Which is why it takes skill for the jury to convict him like they did.

Of course, not all stories have a happy ending. Tom should have been let free, and if the court deemed it necessary, there should have also been a trial for BE for allegedly beating his own daughter. However Tom sadly became a victim of a crime he never committed, which was wrong because it shows that members of our own society still can't get a fair trial, all because of their skin color, which is a pretty stupid reason to be wrongly convicted.

In some ways, this was similar to the part of TKAM where Dill, Scout, and Jem tried to look into the Radley household by going through the back yard and looking through the back window, and almost got shot.. However, in this case, it was a relatively harmless crime, while the courtroom case was huge. Also, in both cases, the true culprit got away with the crime, while someone else took the blame, whether they wanted to or not. Both crimes also had hard evidence to show who really did it, although one was acknowledged more in the TR case. In the spying case, Jem lost his pants on the fence, and everyone believed his cover story for it, that he was playing strip poker. Mr. Radley had said that he saw a Negro running off his property. So in both cases, the blame fell to an innocent black man.