Charly Smith

Equality: A timeless Struggle

The trial is the most gripping, and in some ways the most important, dramatic sequence in To Kill a Mockingbird. The trial overall covers about five chapters with no breaks. The courtroom scene, where Atticus is picking apart the Ewells in front of the whole town, is the most cinematic portion of the book, as is the main focus of the movie of the book produced in 1962. Though the trial targets Tom Robinson, in another sense it is Maycomb that is on trial, because it reveals the injustice and classifying community that do things such as force blacks to sit in a different areas of the courthouse, and while Atticus eventually loses the court case, he successfully reveals this about Maycomb. That is why I chose Atticus’s final argument of the trial as my passage; his closing statement shows the close-mindedness of Maycomb, and how Atticus fights for what is right even if it degrades him in the minds of his neighbors. Right being that people, no matter their skin color, background, religion, or views have the right to be treated equally in a court of law.

Atticus’s closing argument develops him as a character as well as him as a civilian of Maycomb. The passage develops him as a character in two main ways. First, he simply defends Tom Robinson in the prosecution. Atticus defends Robinson in two different ways, one being that he has Mayella testify, and has everyone learn that she was bruised mostly on the left side of her face. Then later when he puts Mr. Ewell on the stand, he has him simply write his name, which proves that Mr. Ewell is left handed. Then when Tom Robinson is testifying, he states that when he was younger he got his left hand and forearm messed up in a cotton gin, rendering it useless, thus showing that it would be extremely difficult for Tom to hit Mayella on the right side of her face with his right hand. Atticus’s next way of defending Tom Robinson occurred when Tom was on the stand explaining what happened, and Tom claims that when he went inside the Ewell home, all the other children were gone except for Mayella, and then Mayella kissed him. She was then caught by her father, who was outside and saw almost everything that happened. Thus giving a reason for why Mr. Ewell would have beat Mayella. The third and final defending argument Atticus used was that Tom Robinson felt sorry for Mayella, which was not something a black person was not supposed to in that time period, but since Tom felt sorry for her why would he want to try to rape her which would make her life much harder than