“To Kill a Mockingbird” was written in
1960, though the events of the story
(which cover a three year period) start
in 1932. It was written at a time of great
racial tension, and was in part inspired
by real life events.
(1) In March of 1931 in Alabama, a group of
white teenagers got into a fight with a
group of black teens. The black teens
managed to force all but one of members
of the white group off the train.
(2) Some of the whites went straight to the
stationmaster to report what they
described as an assault by the black
group.
(3) The stationmaster wired
ahead. A posse at the
next station stopped the
train and rounded up
every black youth they
could find. Nine captured
young men were taken to
a jail in Scottsboro,
Alabama.
(4) Also greeted by the
posse were two young
women, who told the
posse that they had been
raped by a gang of
twelve blacks with
pistols and knives.
(5) The black boys were aged 12 through
21. All were charged with rape. They
were given two incompetent lawyers—
one an unprepared real estate attorney
and the other a 70 year old attorney who
hadn’t tried a case in decades.
(6) At the first trial of “The Scottsboro
Boys,” eight of the nine boys were
convicted and sentenced to death by an
all white jury, despite a lack of evidence
to convict them.
(7) In 1933, in a second trial of one of the
accused black boys, one of the “rape
victims” testified that she had lied, and
no rape had occurred. She and the other
girl, she said, were afraid of being
convicted of another crime, and so
claimed they had been raped to draw
attention away from themselves.
(8) Despite this testimony, the young man
was found guilty and sentenced to death
by electric chair.
(9) The cases against the boys
dragged on for six years, and went
to the Supreme Court twice. It would
be 19 years before the last of the
Scottsboro Boys was released from
prison.
(10) It wasn’t until 1976 that the
Governor of Alabama pardoned the
Boys, and admitted that the trial had
been biased and was an example of
injustice towards blacks.
(11) In the summer of
1955, while visiting his
uncle, 14 year old
Emmett Till joins a
group of teens to go to
the grocery store for
refreshments after a
long day of picking
cotton in the hot sun.
Emmett goes in to buy
bubble gum.
(12) Some of the kids
outside the store later
claim they heard
Emmett whistle at the
white daughter of the
store owners.
(13) Four days later at
about 2:30am, the girls
father and uncle
kidnapped Emmett Till.
They brutally beat him,
took him to the edge of
the Tallahatchie River,
shot him in the head,
then fastened a large
metal fan used for
processing cotton to
his neck with barbed
wire, and pushed his
body in the river.
(14) The two men are charged with
kidnapping and murder. They both plead
innocent. The trial begins, with all white
jurors. (All blacks and white women are
banned from serving as jurors.)
(15) The two men were acquitted of
murdering Emmett till after the jury
deliberated only 67 minutes. One juror tells
a reporter that they wouldn’t have taken so
long if they hadn’t stopped to drink pop.
(16) Five years later, one of the men tells a
reporter, for $4,000, how they killed
Emmett Till.
(17) In 1959, three days before his trial,
Mack Charles Parker, a 23 year old black
truck driver, is lynched by a mob of white
men in Mississippi.
(18) He had been accused of raping a
white woman and was being held in a
local jail. The mob took him from his cell,
beat him, took him to a bridge, shot and
killed him, then weighed him down with
chains and dumped him in the river.
(19) The FBI investigated and identified at
least ten men involved. The U.S.
Department of Justice ruled that there
were no grounds to make an arrest or
press charges. No one was charged with
the crime.