Main Theme in this Chapter

The main theme portrayed in this chapter is Racism/Prejudice/Stereotyping. In Part one of 'To Kill A Mockingbird', readers have already seen how prejudiced the Whites in Maycomb are, against outsider figures. Firstly, we saw how they treated Arthur Radley, better known as Boo Radley. He was a White, yet the other Whites in the county treated him like he was a savage. They stereotyped him because of strange rumours about him, legends about him and they shunned him out of their lives, because he was different.
Since the Radleys didn't conform to the Maycombian's way of life, they were out of the society. But being an outcast was a price you had to pay. Boo Radley was "tortured" by horrible stories made up about him. For example, Miss Stephanie Crawford said he was a strange man, who peeked in windows at night when you are sleeping. She also said he was insane and violent - he stabbed his father in the leg. Besides rumours, Boo Radley was made the scapegoat of every crime in the county. When people's chickens and household pets were found mutilated, the Maycombians pointed their fingers at Boo Radley. From the text it says - "although the culprit was Crazy Addie, who eventually drowned himself in Barker's Eddy, people still looked at the Radley Place, unwilling to discard their initial suspicions.
In the same way here, in Part 2 of the book, the Whites in Maycomb treat Tom Robinson the same way they treat Boo Radley. But in this case, Tom Robinson is slightly different because of his skin colour. Just because he was a black, the Whites hated him. They sided the Ewells during the trial, because the Ewells were Whites. The Whites in Maycomb knew that the Ewells could not be trusted. So why did they want to side them? It is because their prejudice is so strong that they cannot see the justice in the trial. The Whites in Maycomb cannot hear deep down in their hearts what they are feeling. Although they know Tom Robinson could never had raped Mayella Ewell, they still sentenced him to death. It was just a rape case. The jury didn't have to give him such a heavy sentence, but they did, all because of the deep hatred for the Black community in Maycomb.
In this chapter, on Page 246, it says "Maycomb was interested by the news of Tom's death for...". The Whites were only interested. They weren't feeling guilty at all of how they wrongly judged Tom Robinson. All they cared about was themselves. Their prejudice had blinded them of right and wrong. They just treated Tom's death as typical news. It was as if though they expected him to run away, because it was common for niggers to run "blind first chance he saw". He might have been clean, a commited Christian, but he was a black. And to the Whites, all blacks were uneducated and had no mind to plan for anything, be it to escape or to rape someone.

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