One common theme of To Kill A Mockingbird is racial issues in America in the 1930s, after the Great Depression. In the book, the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama faces some especially difficult racial issues intensified by the trial of Tom Robinson. Tom Robinson is an African-American man accused of raping a white woman. While the narrator’s father, Atticus, takes the case because he believes that Tom may not be guilty, almost the rest of the entire town is already certain that Tom has committed the crime. Even the judge is prepared to rule against him. The reason why nobody except for Atticus cares to hear Tom’s story is because in the time that the book was set, a white man’s word had ten times more influence than a black man’s. Tom needs
