St. Bernards College 2013 Yearbook #1 | Page 48

Student Content Mockingbird” illustrates this point nicely. Mr Gilmore, a lawyer in the Tom Robinson trial, is enraged when Tom says he felt sorry for Mayella Ewell. This shows how the white people felt they were more important than the Africans and for an African to feel sorry for them was considered an insult. In the Name of Justice By Michael Brennan (Y12 - EP) Y Also, since many Europeans were educated, they were more likely to be selected on a jury. In many cases, trials between a white man and an African were decided by an all-white jury, which heavily favoured the white man. ou’re a black man, you are standing in court, awaiting the jury’s verdict. All of the evidence is in your favour: GUILTY! You’re a white man, you are standing in court, awaiting the jury’s verdict. All the evidence is in your favour: Innocent... There have been several severe examples of this extreme prejudice towards African Americans. For example, Jena High School located in a small town in Jena, Louisiana (a state infmaous for racis m) experienced some of this injustice first hand. Student Voice Is this justice? Is this the way we want crime to be handled in our country? How could people be so caught up with racial differences that they fail to see the truth that is staring them right in the face. Throughout the course of history, there has been a vast difference in the way that Europeans (or people with pale skin) have been treated by the justice system. The novel “To Kill a Mockingbird”, written by Harper Lee addressed the issue of injustice towards African Americans through the way Tom Robinson is found guilty, even though all of the evidence was in Tom’s favour. However, there are always two sides to every story and I will be looking at the white people’s view of the justice system of the time (early 19th Century) compared to the African Americans’ perspective of the system. For African Americans, the justice system was anything but just. They could go into court totally innocent with all of the evidence in their favour and end up with a life sentence in jail, or even a death sentence, as was the case with Tom Robinson. For an African American, going to court could be a death sentence in itself. African Americans were treated as inferior beings to white men and as horrible as this sounds, it was the cruel reality of the 19th Century. The main reason for this inferior treatment was because the Africans were shipped out from Africa and sold as slaves in America. They worked on plantations, farming and cotton picking. Some worked as house servants. The conditions these slaves undured were unthinkable. They were stacked so tightly in ships that they were unable to move for weeks on end on their way to America. They were whipped and beaten at the hands of their unreasonable owners and were fed so little that many starved to death. The Americans had no respect for the Africans. They were merely viewed as a means to make money. This is one of the reasons why they were treated so badly. 46 Tom Robinson worked as a cotton picker and he was viewed as a lesser being in the Maycomb white community, even though he was a very nice man. He never had a bad word to say about anyone and his manners were impeccable. Scout even said, “in their own way, Tom Robinson’s manners were as good as Atticus’,” which is very high praise. The only reason for the injustice was his skin colour. He wasn’t a drunkard like Bob Ewell and he behaved much more civilly than Bob, but his skin colour put him below Bob in society. From the white man’s perspective, the justice system presented no trouble. They could be assured that they were proven innocent if they were up against an African American, no matter what the case or what they had done. Even for a man like Bob Ewell, who is as horrible aas a person could be and is clearly guilty of perjury. However, he can get off the hook because of his skin colour. A main reason that Europeans felt that they were better than the Africans was because many Europeans were educated and most Africans were not. Many Africans could neither read nor write so they were viewed as inferior. They were made to work for the educated Europeans who had money and land. This is one of the main reasons why Africans were treated so poorly by the justice system. Also educated Europeans considered themselves to be more credible and trustworthy and therefore more likely to be innocent. An event from Harper Lee’s “To Kill a A group of African American boys at the high school asked a teacher if they could sit under a tree at lunch time with the other white boys. The teacher told them they could sit wherever they wanted to. Next morning, three nooses hung from the branches. The students who hung the nooses received a brief suspension from the school, but no further consequences arose from the incident. Or so they thought. This incident was only one of many and the racial tension between the whites and the blacks was beginning to boil over. Many fights started to break out between the two races with the Africans constantly receiving harsher sentences. All of these little confrontations added to the tensions between the opposing races, finally resulting in an incident referred to as, “The Jena Six”. In December 2006, six African American youths, all from Jena High School, attacked a white school mate Justin Barker. The punishment? Felony charges of attempted murder, up to @90,000 worth of fines and potentially 20 year jail sentences. The severity of these charges provoked widespread controversy as people started to realise how poorly the African Americans were being treated. If it had been six white boys beating up an African boy, would these charges have been the same? Would charges even have been laid? This is just another example of how unfair the justice system is to African Americans. As you can see from the evidence above, over the years, the justice system has favoured the white people and that needs to change. However, it is not about reversing the system so white people are discriminiated against. It is about creating a society where all people are considered equal despite their race or culture. If we can treat everyone as an equal, injustice can be stopped. St Bernard’s College 2013