As Nelson Mandela, an anti-apartheid revolutionary and political leader, once said, “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart that its opposite.” Nelson Mandela spent his life fighting for racial equality. He demonstrates how being an African American should not mean they are hated nor oppressed, but rather empathized and seen with compassion. Likewise, in To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee uses the motif of getting into someone else’s shoes and the parallelism of the morality represented in Boo Radley and Tom Robinson to prove to readers in the
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Lee first makes her readers in the sixties face their reality when the narrator reflects on how she has treated Boo Radley, stating, “Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad” (Lee 373). The brilliant Harper Lee decides to start the book dealing with the lack of empathy given to an abnormal white man. Recognizing lack of empathy allows readers to develop empathy easier than if he was a black man because people are not very easily persuaded out of their beliefs, just like doing so did for Scout when she was discovering her own morals. It is always easier to develop compassion and empathy towards those you feel have not done anything to not deserve it. Harper Lee then transfers her reader’s compassion to Tom Robinson by manipulating the now-fragile feelings of her audience. As the narrator comes to another moment of reflection and discovery, Lee trusts her readers will as well: “Mr. Underwood didn’t talk about miscarriages of justice, he was writing so schoolchildren could understand … He likened Tom’s death to the senseless slaughter of songbirds by hunters and children … Senseless killing- Tom had been given due process of law to the day of his death; he had been tried openl and convicted by twelve good men and true; my father had fought for him all the way. Then Mr. Underwood’s meaning became clear: Atticus had used every tool available to free men to save Tom Robinson, but in the secret courts of men’s hearts Atticus had no case. Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened
Lee first makes her readers in the sixties face their reality when the narrator reflects on how she has treated Boo Radley, stating, “Neighbors bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad” (Lee 373). The brilliant Harper Lee decides to start the book dealing with the lack of empathy given to an abnormal white man. Recognizing lack of empathy allows readers to develop empathy easier than if he was a black man because people are not very easily persuaded out of their beliefs, just like doing so did for Scout when she was discovering her own morals. It is always easier to develop compassion and empathy towards those you feel have not done anything to not deserve it. Harper Lee then transfers her reader’s compassion to Tom Robinson by manipulating the now-fragile feelings of her audience. As the narrator comes to another moment of reflection and discovery, Lee trusts her readers will as well: “Mr. Underwood didn’t talk about miscarriages of justice, he was writing so schoolchildren could understand … He likened Tom’s death to the senseless slaughter of songbirds by hunters and children … Senseless killing- Tom had been given due process of law to the day of his death; he had been tried openl and convicted by twelve good men and true; my father had fought for him all the way. Then Mr. Underwood’s meaning became clear: Atticus had used every tool available to free men to save Tom Robinson, but in the secret courts of men’s hearts Atticus had no case. Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened