Shaun Skaff
Brown
H. English 9 – Period 5
4 December 2012
TKMB Annalists
There have been many tragedies on the road for equality among men. While all were terrible and cruel, some are the focal points of the great change. A few of the most famous were Emmett Till, The Scottsboro Boys, and Medgar Evans. All of these were wonderfully captured by Harper Lee and played some part in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“To Kill a Mockingbird” is partly about a young girl named Scout as she experiences her father defend a black man, named Tom Robinson, in a rape case he did not commit. She watches as he must explain that Tom would never harm someone, especially not a white woman, to a completely white and racist jury. She sits through the case as he time and time again proves that it was not Tom who harmed the victim, Mayella. It all ends when Tom says he felt sorry for her, which would have been fine and generous if he were not black. This one slip up makes up the juries minds; he is found guilty and shot when he supposedly tries to escape.
The case of Emmitt Till is a horrible and absolutely cruel story. In August of 1955 14 year old Emmitt Till took a trip to Mississippi to visit his family. While down there he began to talk about his girlfriend up north and was dared to flirt with a white woman. It is reported that he made rude gestures and called her honey. When the woman's husband found out him and his friends took Emmitt and brutally murdered him. His body was found three days later on the side of a river. The men were put on trial and aqquited. This meant they were free of the accusation. A main part of this was the fact that Emmitts body was so mutilated when it was retrieved that it could not be identified as him for sure. Sort of like in “To Kill a Mockingbird” the white man one because of racism. The case of Emmit Till was the initial spark of the civil rights movement.
Another case was the Scottsboro Boys
