The film 12 Angry Men by Sidney Lumet, is a courtroom drama with, well: twelve angry men trapped inside a steaming hot room, keen to deliver a verdict about a minority teen convicted of murdering his father. According to IMDb, the film made it’s debut in April of 1957, this film tested the boundaries between race relations and the effect of an all-white jury during the high peaks of the civil rights movement.
The film revolves around a young man, most likely Puerto Rican although his ethnicity is never disclosed, who is convicted of killing his father. Before you are introduced in the film, the prosecution has already laid down the motive, the murder weapon, the witnesses, and the accused. All that’s left is the trial. The movie starts with …show more content…
One of the reasons the civil rights movement was so popular in the 1950’s is because it was prominent in many people’s lives. Many of the civil rights issues even reached the supreme court, one such, in 1954, three years before the movie release, was Brown v. Board of Education where the Court ruled, in a unanimous vote that the segregation of Black and White students is unjust and was struck down (History 5). Supreme Court cases similar to this one in the issues they decided reached the front pages of newspapers across the country. Such as the newspaper: The Carolina Times, where High Court cases where written about several times in the 1950’s (Carolina). And since newspapers are the majority source of news for citizens in the 1950’s, about ⅓ of the population received a daily newspaper (Kamarck 2-11), a considerable amount of people were exposed to these issues. These prominent social issues left the reader with an emotional and material opinion on the subject because of the closeness of these issues to communities along with the facts provided about racial stereotyping. Aside from Supreme Court cases, many major discrimination events were also written about. One of the most strongly heard was the murder of Emmett Till - who in 1955 was brutally beat and mangled by two white men. After the mother held an open-casket funeral, “Jet magazine publishes a photo of Till's battered body on its cover” (). The pair was acquitted by an all-white jury despite overwhelming evidence which raised eyebrows about racial discrimination in a jury. This and other civil rights issues, such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, where a group boycotted a bus for forcing a black women to give up her seat to a white man, posted in The
The film revolves around a young man, most likely Puerto Rican although his ethnicity is never disclosed, who is convicted of killing his father. Before you are introduced in the film, the prosecution has already laid down the motive, the murder weapon, the witnesses, and the accused. All that’s left is the trial. The movie starts with …show more content…
One of the reasons the civil rights movement was so popular in the 1950’s is because it was prominent in many people’s lives. Many of the civil rights issues even reached the supreme court, one such, in 1954, three years before the movie release, was Brown v. Board of Education where the Court ruled, in a unanimous vote that the segregation of Black and White students is unjust and was struck down (History 5). Supreme Court cases similar to this one in the issues they decided reached the front pages of newspapers across the country. Such as the newspaper: The Carolina Times, where High Court cases where written about several times in the 1950’s (Carolina). And since newspapers are the majority source of news for citizens in the 1950’s, about ⅓ of the population received a daily newspaper (Kamarck 2-11), a considerable amount of people were exposed to these issues. These prominent social issues left the reader with an emotional and material opinion on the subject because of the closeness of these issues to communities along with the facts provided about racial stereotyping. Aside from Supreme Court cases, many major discrimination events were also written about. One of the most strongly heard was the murder of Emmett Till - who in 1955 was brutally beat and mangled by two white men. After the mother held an open-casket funeral, “Jet magazine publishes a photo of Till's battered body on its cover” (). The pair was acquitted by an all-white jury despite overwhelming evidence which raised eyebrows about racial discrimination in a jury. This and other civil rights issues, such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, where a group boycotted a bus for forcing a black women to give up her seat to a white man, posted in The