The Theme Of Prejudice In 'To Kill A Mockingbird'

Let’s Cure the “Disease” of Prejudice Together The town of Maycomb has a “usual disease.” Atticus says in chapter 9, “You know what’s going to happen as well as I do, Jack, and I hope and pray I can get Jem and Scout through it without bitterness, and most of all, without catching Maycomb’s usual disease. Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don’t pretend to understand… I just hope that Jem and Scout come to me for their answers instead of listening to the town. I hope they trust me enough…” So what is the usual disease? And what does it have to do with eliminating prejudice? To answer this question, we need to dig deeper into To Kill a Mockingbird. In the novel, Atticus has a job of defending Tom Robinson, a black man, in court. He is accused of raping Mayella Ewell, a white woman, and he is certain to lose. Even so Atticus says earlier in chapter 9, “Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win.” As expected, Atticus gets some serious blowback for what he is fighting for. Aunt Alexandra says that the Finch family name will go to shame, and they cannot be “fine folk” anymore. His own nephew even bothers Scout about it. It’s simply a

Tom is confident, stellar, and he seems believable. After a few hours, the jury finally comes to a conclusion that: (drumroll please) Tom is guilty. This doesn’t come as a surprise to Atticus, but Jem and Scout are scarred. They are shocked at how a man could be convicted with puny evidence like what the Ewells gave. When Jem asks how they could do it Atticus says at the beginning of chapter 22, “I don’t know, but they did it. They’ve done it before, they did it tonight and they’ll do it again and when they do it- seems that only children weep. Good