Though the prison guard, an individual, shot Tom Robinson dead, it does not necessarily mean that he alone is responsible for the tragic loss of Tom Robinson. The society of Maycomb County is conveyed to be a racist community. Many factors prove this fact, such as the racial slurs that are hissed towards the coloured folks. Coloured people are treated with hatred and suppressed by the predominantly white society. Due to the fact that coloured folks are prejudiced against, Tom Robinson and his lawyer, Atticus Finch “won’t win, [and they] can’t win.” This exhibits that due to his skin colour, Tom Robinson did not have stand a chance to win the court case, thus displays the height of the prejudice in Maycomb society. Tom Robinson should not have been sentenced guilty, and the citizens of Maycomb are well aware of that. A factor that may have resulted in the loss of Tom Robinson’s case was that the jury was picked randomly, and the jury happened to be bias against coloured people.
A quote that proves this is when Atticus says to Jem, “If you had been on the jury, son, and eleven other boys like you, Tom would be a free man.” This quote explains that if the court had been run by eleven men who were taught not to be prejudice, like Jem, then the case would have a different outcome. Though Mayella Ewell and her father, Bob Ewell’s accusations had been clearly fictitious, “Tom Robinson was still falsely convicted. In the era of To Kill A Mockingbird, a white woman’s word would overrule a black man’s by far. Tom Robinson was not guilty for raping Mayella Ewell, but for simply being coloured -which is one of the main reasons that society had already killed Tom Robinson before he was shot dead by the prison guard. “..remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy.
The Essay on Tom Robinson Negroes White Prejudice
The novel 'To Kill A Mockingbird', written by Harper Lee, is set in the mid-1930's in Maycomb, a small, isolated, inward looking town in Alabama, USA. The book is mostly dominated by racial prejudice against Negroes. This prejudice, which the southern states conformed, resulted in an American Civil War. The South's economy prospered through selling good like sugar, cotton and tobacco, which were ...
They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, They don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us.” In the novel, Atticus tells his kids that it is wrong to kill a mockingbird because they are harmless creatures that aren’t a threat to anyone. It is an analogy for killing an innocent man. Rare people like Atticus realize that mockingbirds represent the coloured folks. They do not create trouble and only wish to have good intentions. The prison guard who shot Tom Robinson dead, is not fully responsible for the tragic loss of Tom Robinson’s life. Tom Robinson was killed mentally by society, not the prison guard alone. Tom Robinson is let down by the justice system once and has absolutely no faith for his acquittal. Having been convicted of raping a white woman, he knew that, he had little to no chance that an appeal would go him any good. He was tired of taking a white man’s chances, and decided to take his own. In Alabama, the sentence for rape was death, so he, in effect, committed suicide by trying to escape from jail.
