Tom Robinson's Speech

Citizens of Maycomb, I come to you as a friend. I speak to you all as equals, black and white men alike. We have quite the dilemma in our town right now. To be satisfied with sentencing Tom Robinson with the attack and rape of Mayella Ewell without examining the facts is racist and could possibly get me disbarred for not carrying out my duty to the truth. I am trying my best to find out what really happened that fateful afternoon. So if you open your minds to all of the facts instead of fueling black folk stereotypes, it would help me give you the truth.

Ms Ewell was savagely beaten by someone of left-handed nature. As I have just shown you, Tom cannot use his left hand due to an injury some time ago. This should be enough evidence to conclude this trial, but for the sake of making things extra clear, I will continue. I know it is hard to accept the fact that maybe Whites aren’t all that different from Black folk, but listen nonetheless.

Tom Robinson is a good man. He has a wife and three children that he puts food on the table for every day. They attend church every sunday as a family, helping out in any way they can. Many people can be witness for Tom Robinson’s good nature. I should make it clear that both Tom and Mayella have

confessed that he would help her best he could with things she needed fixing or little jobs around the house that no white woman should do. He did that out of the kindness of his heart, not expecting a dime from her.

Tom has said, under oath may I stress, that Mayella stopped her attack on him when she was interrupted by her father, Robert Ewell. Both Mayella and Robert have corroborated his story by confessing that Robert did unexpectedly enter the house. The facts of who-did-what is now up for question. We know that Tom could not have beaten Mayella, so unless there was another person present that nobody is telling us about, it was most likely Robert Ewell who beat Mayella so viciously. It would not surprise me, nor should it you, that in his most-likely drunken state he beat and raped his own daughter.

Now the question is If Tom was advancing on Mayella, why did her father beat her, instead of going after Tom? If you walked in on someone, let alone a Black man in 1930, advancing on your daughter, why would you then go and physically abuse said daughter for a crime she could not stop? Would you not run after that man? The way Robert Ewell reacted to being a witness to such a foul crime obviously points to the situation where Mayella had been advancing on Tom. And as Mr Robinson said in his statement, he did not want to hit someone in defense, let alone a White woman. He did not feel that violence to Mayella would solve anything. So he ran. If you cannot stop what is happening, what do you do? He could not take the high road with this, so he chose flight over fight.

I know that you would all like to believe Black folk are ruthless animals that need to be kept in line.

But if you accept this stereotype, I might as well stop talking. If black people are so horrible, why do we let them cook for us and clean for us and look after our children? Why would we trust them with so much responsibility if they were simple animals. Mayella and her father thought that if they accused Tom Robinson, a black man, of beating and raping Ms Ewell, a white woman, that they could both get away with their crimes. But Tom Robinson is not ruthless, and even if he was animalistic, he could not physically inflict the wounds on Mayella. So it is clear that it was not him that committed these crimes, but his

accusers.

I sincerely hope that you take what I have said into account and make sure that you punish the person guilty of these crimes, and not a faultless victim in a society ruled by White men.