To Kill a Mocking Bird

¶ … Kill a Mockingbird

Racism leads to a prejudice that can ultimately affect one's fate through the road of life. Give an entire town reason to hate a certain type of man, and the town can immediately cast that man out for the very color of his skin. Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird explores this prejudice in a rural American town in the South. Lee's fictional creation of Maycomb, Alabama showcases a world where racism runs rampant, to the point of unfairness in the justice system, and opens the reader's eyes to a society where the color of one's skin determines one's town rank. This viewpoint is shown tremendously through the trial of Tom Robinson, the mockingbird who is accused of things he did not do; that he is a black man only makes him guilty.

Maycomb is fashioned much like that of an actual Southern town during the Great Depression; it is "an old town," where there "[is] no hurry, for there [is] nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with." It is a town filled with ignorance and a prolonged sense of superiority with relation to the white race. A "trashy white man" like Bob Ewell is the lowest rank of white man in the town. Yet it is the black man like Tom Robinson who is at the bottom of this hierarchal ladder. It does not even matter if Tom is the epitome of goodness, pity, and innocence (a harmless "mockingbird," as it were). Tom is a black man, and in Maycomb, all black men are created equal; that is, they are all rotten scoundrels who are expected to rape, steal, and wreak havoc within white society.

This racism is further aggravated when the trial of Tom Robinson is put to Maycomb's justice system. Accused of having raped Bob Ewell's daughter Mayella, Tom receives his only aid in Atticus Finch, the defense attorney for the trial. Because of this staunch purpose to defend the rights of the black man, Atticus is labeled a "nigger-lover" and becomes mostly shunned by the community. Scout and Jem, Atticus' children, are distraught at the way the townsfolk ostracize their father; yet Atticus remains determined to defend Tom. "Nigger-lover is just one of those terms that don't mean anything -- like snot-nose," Atticus tells Scout in order to assuage her concerns. In Atticus' eyes, the courtroom is the "one place where a man ought to get a square deal...be he any color of the rainbow."

Of course, Atticus realizes that "people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box." The verdict at the end remains the same, even after a poignant court scene with Atticus' final, moving words. Tom Robinson is pronounced guilty of an offense he did not commit, even though the most that Tom really did is show pity upon a lonely Mayella Ewell. Tom is the mockingbird, who "[doesn't] do one thing but make music for us to enjoy," and yet he is sinfully killed for doing nothing but "sing [his] heart out for us"; all due to a deep-rooted prejudice that encompasses the town. With a shaken faith in the justice system, Atticus proclaims that "white men cheat black men every day of your life." In his eyes, that white man is nothing but "trash," a blemish in society, regardless of the societal ranking that man has.