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Impact Of Jim Crow Laws In To Kill A Mockingbird

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During the Reconstruction era (1865) there were many blacks living as free men among the whites, the white people still did not want to give full rights to the blacks so they came up with jim crow laws. Jim crow laws sole purpose was to take rights away from blacks and degrade them as humans, the origin of the name Jim Crow goes back to theater around 1830. Jim Crow laws were not only unethical but illegal according to the U.S bill of rights, the Black people did not take these laws laying down and showed civil disobedience in order to try to combat these laws. Many works of literature such as To Kill a Mockingbird make references to Jim crow laws and the impact they had on blacks. The origin of the word Jim Crow dates back to theater when …show more content…
In the book her father Atticus is a lawyer in the small town of Maycomb Alabama, he takes up a case in which a black man (Tom Robinson) is accused of raping a white woman Mayella Ewell. The Ewells are considered the some of the poorest and least mannered people of Maycomb however they still has an advantage over Tom because she is white and he is black. If Tom lost he would be given the death penalty. Atticus presented an immense amount of evidence against the Ewells however, in the end he lost and was killed trying to escape from prison. This just goes to show how unjust the system was at the time. Jim Crow Laws made it impossible for a man of color to win against a white man because of the laws set in place, if a black man touches a white woman he runs the risk of being charged with rape and in the end the everything the white woman says has to be the truth because there is a law that says the word of a white person is greater than that of a colored man. What makes it all worse is that there was no direct evidence to go against mayella's claim of the rape but there was so much going against the fact that Tom was the one who raped her. For instance Tom had a crippled hand and no official doctored report states that she was raped the only thing to imply that she was raped was the fact that she was covered in bruises aside from this no official doctor's note was given. Despite the fact that his is just a book it depicts a very real subject matter, a time were laws prevented black people from doing anything to go against or put themselves on equal group with a white

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