Analysis Of The Film A Lesson Before Dying

In our country’s Declaration of Independence the founding father’s proclaimed that all men were created equal. History has shown that these words were not necessarily true for people of color nor women. The criminal justice system has shown to be corrupt by racial profiling and racism. Court cases that are decided with a peer jury, had always seemed to have had their mind made up about a case involving an African American without hearing the facts first. Trials for people of color in the Jim Crow era were not fair and unbiased, African Americans were always guilty until proven innocent, which rarely happened. In the film A Lesson Before Dying, Jefferson, who is in the wrong place at the wrong time is wrongly imprisoned and found guilty of a crime he did not commit. Jefferson had been in a store where the murder of …show more content…
Unlike A Lesson Before Dying, the events in this film were based on the real trial of nine African American teenagers. The nine young men, dubbed as the Scottsboro boys, had been accused of raping two white women on a train they were illegally traveling on. The community was furious with the action these nine boys had performed, again it was a white woman’s word which held significantly more weight than nine black boys. The boys take the stand one by one, and the audience is left awestruck. How could the jury and community not see that these boys were incapable of the act they were accused of? They were disease stricken, uneducated, and unfortunate boys, but they were not rapists. The jury in this trial consisted of all white men, whom had their minds made up on the way they were going to rule this case before anyone in the court had even spoken a word. The rage the community felt towards these boys was immense, and if they were not charged and convicted they had threatened to take matters into their own