To Kill a Mockingbird and the Scottsboro Affair by Harper LeeOn March 25, 1931, a group of nine boys were accused of raping two girls aboard a train traveling from Paint Rock in Alabama across the state line. The trial of these boys had collectively become known as the Scottsboro case. Several years later Harper Lee wrote her famous novel To Kill a Mockingbird. In this story a young Tom Robinson is accused of raping a white woman. It is by understanding the parallel between Tom Robinson's case in To Kill a Mockingbird and the Scottsboro case that one can understand that a fair trial was unlikely and that due to Tom Robinson's race he was presumed guilty before trial. case and the traces of Tom Robinson, the first important parallel to the shadow of the lynching that threatens the accused in both. The threat of lynching occurs in the novel when Tom Robinson is transported to the Maycomb city jail. That night a crowd of people from the nearby community called Old Sarum gather around the prison in an attempt to kidnap him. This type of behavior is certainly very plausible for this time period. In an event almost identical to that of the novel, on a cold night in 1931, after the Scottsboro boys were convicted, a scene straight out of To Kill a Mockingbird seemed to come to life. That night Dan T. Carter, the court historian, recounts that "farmers from the nearby hills began to gather, and by dusk a crowd of several hundred people stood outside the two-story prison." (Carter 7) Much like the Old Sarum mob, most of these people were poor white farmers out for the blood of a black man. The connection of Southern society's feelings towards a black man committing a crime against some... middle of paper... connections to the Scottsboro case. In conclusion, both the Scottsboro case and the case of Tom Robinson, whether fact or fiction, a human being of flesh but not skin, was damned for a belief he could not control, he was black. Works Cited Carter, Dan T. Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South. New York: W. W. Norton, 1935. Durr, Virginia Foster. Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Price. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1963.Flynt, Wanye. Poor but Proud: Alabama's Poor Whites. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1933. Hamilton, Virginia. Alabama: a bicentennial history. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. New York: Warner Publications, 1982. Tindall, George Brown. The Emergence of the New South 1913-1937. Baton Rouge:Louisiana State University Press, 1970.