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Joshua Desautels
PLS 64
Summer 2014
Final paper
The Trial of Tom Robinson--The Role of Race and Jury Selection in To Kill A Mockingbird
Juries are supposed to be juries of your peers. That is to say, they are supposed to
represent a wide range of people, from an assortment of different walks of life. That is how it
tends to work today, and in theory that is how it has always been supposed to work. In theory. In
the past, at least, in practice, what happened was very different. Blacks were not allowed to serve
on juries until 1875,1 although in certain places they may have been serving on juries as early as
1860,2 though this was not common.
In the South, however, as shown in To Kill A Mockingbird, blacks continued to be barred
from serving on juries, at least after Reconstruction ended in 1877, the Federal troops pulled out,
and the conservative whites took over again and set up what came to be known as Jim Crow
laws, meant to essentially shut blacks out of society. As shown in To Kill A Mockingbird, set in
the 1930s South, the juries were still all white at that time in that part of the country. This meant
that, in the pre-Civil Rights South, a black defendant like Tom Robinson would be confronted
with an all-white jury which, due to their prejudices toward blacks, would be almost guaranteed
to find him guilty, and therefore there was no way he could get a fair trial.
In the story, Tom Robinson, a black man, has been arrested and charged with raping a
white woman, Mayella Ewell. Tom Robinson’s case is brought to local attorney Atticus Finch,
who agrees to take it on. During the course of the trial, certain characters not only reveal their
own prejudices, but attempt to play on the all-white jury’s pre-disposition to accept Mayella’s
1 http://www.chacha.com/question/when-were-african-americans-allowed-to-sit-on-juries
2 http://www.chacha.com/question/when-were-black-people-allowed-on-a-jury

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word over Tom’s, as well, despite the fact that the actual evidence quickly seems to clearly
indicate Tom’s innocence.
Listening to the testimony of the sheriff and Mayella’s father, you get the sense that
really all they saw was a black man with Mayella, who they might have assumed was Tom
Robinson given how he would go by there (it was subsequently established that the man who
was in Mayella’s house was, in fact, Tom Robinson). It is then demonstrated that Mayella’s face
was bruised on her right side, which would have been Tom’s left-hand side, only Tom’s left arm
was crippled, so therefore he obviously could not have used his left hand to attack Mayella. This
is first demonstrated when Atticus has Tom catch a glass with his right hand, but then he cannot
catch it with his left hand because his left hand is crippled. If Tom had attacked Mayella, the
bruises should have been on her left side, his right-hand side. One would presume a non-
prejudicial jury would have considered those things, and come to the appropriate conclusion.
When Tom is sworn in before testifying, he must place his good right hand on the book
(Bible, presumably?) rather than his crippled left, again demonstrating that he could not have
attacked Mayella with his left hand. Tom explains that he would go by the Ewells’ house, and
Mayella would attempt to engage him in conversation. This time, Mayella asked him to come
inside and “bust up a chiffarobe”. Tom agreed. Then Tom went inside to the chifforobe. Then
Tom turned around, and Mayella was on him. Tom, presumably understanding that this could
lead to the exact legal situation he is now in, was frightened. He eventually left, but unbeknownst
to him, Mayella’s father saw them together, and had already gone to get the sheriff. The defense
seems to be suggesting here that it was really Mayella who seduced Tom. (While here, this
genuinely seems to be the case, more contemporary situations tend to portray this claim as
simply the rapist’s pathetic attempt to rationalize his actions.)

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On cross-examination, it is revealed that Tom felt sorry for Mayella. This shocks the
jurors, who are unable to comprehend a black man feeling sorry for a white woman. The
prosecution’s job in this trial is actually quite simple: all they have to do is play into the jurors’
racial prejudices, and convince the jurors of simply the possibility that Tom could have raped
Mayella, knowing the likelihood that the jury will take the word of a white woman over that of a
black man.
It is suggested that it was actually Mayella’s father who attacked her, and that he has
done so before, and that Mayella thus became desperate for any other human contact, even black
human contact. In the closing arguments, Atticus tries to get the jury to put aside their prejudice
against Tom and look at the actual evidence, which seems to clearly indicate Tom’s innocence.
Here we get to a point where it seems as though even the idealist Atticus, committed though he is
to proving Tom Robinson’s innocence, may be prejudiced on some level, as he asserts that
Mayella broke “one of the time-honored rules of our society” in that “she tempted a Negro.”
Also, despite him saying that he sympathized with her situation and considered her “a victim of
ignorance” (though “not to the point of putting a man’s life on the line.”), Atticus’s approach to
Mayella might in some respects be seen by a modern audience as at least slightly sexist and/or at
the very least patronizing. She certainly seemed to perceive as such.
The jury leaves to deliberate. Atticus is heartened by the fact that they do not return
particularly quickly, thinking that must mean they are at least considering the actual evidence.
Nevertheless, when the jury comes back, they announce that they have unanimously found Tom
Robinson guilty of raping Mayella Ewell. Atticus is not surprised, despite his previous optimism
regarding the length of the jury deliberations, and immediately plans for an appeal, which he tells
Tom that he is confident they will win. However, as Tom is transported back to the town where

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he was being held before the actual trial started, he tries to escape, one of the officers shoots at
him, supposedly intending only to wound him, but “missed,” and Tom is killed. Atticus sadly
reflects that the last thing he told Tom was not to lease heart, that Atticus was confident they
would win on appeal.
The tragedy here is that one would hope this wouldn’t happen like this today in most of
the country, even that it wouldn’t have happened like that back then if it had happened
someplace else in the country, and even under those circumstances, the pre-Civil Rights South,
Atticus was confident they’d eventually win on appeal if they just didn’t lose heart and kept at it.
That is the tragedy, and that is why this story demonstrates why the “jury of your peers” concept
is so important, not just the concept itself, but also how it is defined—a real jury of your peers, or
a bare minimum, as is the case not only here in this particular story, but throughout the pre-Civil
Rights South.