Midnight Dreams

Behind the door, nervous, excited voices await, waiting to spill the contents of their minds. Your family sits besides you, guiding you through this hard time. The odds are stacked against you; you have no chance of winning. The door opens, and a man beckons you in with disgust. You walk in, and a jury is to one side, the judge in the front, the crowd to the other side. The judge looks at you, a face of both pity and contempt. The case begins, and the it seems like it’s only beginning. In the book To Kill A Mocking Bird, the author, Harper Lee, shows how badly the U.S. treated people of non-white origin.

In To Kill A Mocking Bird, a courtroom case was called for an unjust cause. A colored man, Tom Robinson, was accused of raping and beating the daughter of a known drinker, Bob Ewell. The case seems simple enough, let’s just arrest Robinson and punish him severely. But no, because he is colored, he is now inferior, let’s toy with him and make him suffer. Robinson will always lose, because of how he is treated because his skin color is different. Colored people back then were used to being beaten, treated unfairly, and just tried to deal with it. Tom Robinson was known to be an honest, nice person, but apparently, when it’s a white man to a black man, everything is blown out of proportion. This was all normalcy, and people died with no one from anywhere else knowing their unjust and horrible fate. This is only one small level of racism, and there is only more to come.

Now it seems obvious that Robinson should be arrested and killed immediately, but not for just the reason of being colored. He raped somebody, he should be killed for that! But he only has one arm, his right, and the bruises on Mary Ewell were on her right, usually inflicted by the left hand. Bob Ewell signed a legal paper with his left hand, and he is a heavy drinker, but even when such simple, case ending facts are shown, skin color and how a white man cannot be accused by the man who supposedly “did” the crime. So, even when this is seen by nearly everyone in the room, and even when Atticus, one of the most respected, honest, and down to earth people in town, is fighting for Tom, nothing can stop what the jury decides, and when the jury is corrupt, there is no hope. This is, yet again, only normal, it’s not like Robinson would have won anyways, and these are the thoughts of every person trying to fighting for equal rights.

Another point of racial profiling in this book is how quick we all are to see somebody’s faults, but are so slow to realize ours. When Atticus, Scout, and Jem went to the jail to see Tom, a mob was formed outside the jail, getting ready to take him out of the jail, and either severely injure him or go as far as killing him. When Atticus tries to reason with them, they completely ignore him. Atticus cannot stop them without acting like them, and if he did that, he might as well have joined the mob and killed Tom. But when Scout walked right up to Walter Cunningham, and directly insulted him in a childish fashion about how he was ready to kill somebody who wasn’t even known to be innocent or guilty yet, even without doing it on purpose, the whole mob backs off, and leaves. “So it took an eight-year-old child to bring ‘em to their senses…. That proves something – that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they’re still human. Hmp, maybe we need a police force of children.” Said by Atticus, he is saying just how slow the people in the mob were, ready to kill a single man, the attitude they show toward a black man, the attitude they would show towards an animal. Atticus means exactly what is said above, how fast they were to kill him, but not so fast to realize how savage they were acting.

When Robinson was “caught”, nobody paid attention to him, lest they too be charged with a crime. Not even his own people responded to him. Back then, this was normal, now, it is considered cruel and mean, immature, and if taken to a certain degree, against the law. An example of how this has changed today is President Barack Obama’s recent inauguration. It shows that how far racism has dropped, and how far people can now get. If this had happened in Lee’s time, supposing that people of non-white origin could run for president, he would either A. Be framed for something he didn’t do, killed because somebody said “How dare he run for president, he is inferior, we should kill him!” or B. Lose the election as quickly as he showed up, and fade into the background, never to be seen again. However, due to his recent breakthrough in racism, it shows just how far the U.S. has come in the equality of people, as people set aside their differences, and let each man do as he wishes, not being enslaved or hated for his differences.

You walk out of the room, the hallway gray, empty, silent. Your thoughts are completely scattered, a thousand different things to do, but only so small time to do it. A bench is ahead of you. You should sit. You fall onto the bench, exhausted. A single idea form in your mind. A steady, calm resolve, to only fight harder. These thoughts represented every man, woman and child that was killed unfairly because of his color back in Harper Lee’s time. Harper Lee brings a good point by showing how corrupt people were, and how slow our government was to realize it, and how nobody could stop all of these problems no matter what they tried.