Fiction
- In the novel and film To Kill a Mockingbird, a black man is accused of rape and tried before an all-white jury; in a central scene, principled defense attorney Atticus Finch fails to sway the verdict toward his client, who is later shot trying to escape. Critic Roger Ebert calls Finch's summation "one of Gregory Peck's great scenes".
- Melvin Van Peebles' film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song was advertised with a tagline Rated X by an All-White Jury, referring to the MPAA Ratings Board, which had given the film an X rating. Van Peebles used the claim in posters and t-shirts as a "rallying cry" for the black audience he was trying to reach.
- The play and film Twelve Angry Men depicts an all-white jury tasked with deliberating the guilt of a black defendant who is accused of murdering his father.
Read more about this topic: All-white Jury
Famous quotes containing the word fiction:
“We ignore thriller writers at our peril. Their genre is the political condition. They massage our dreams and magnify our nightmares. If it is true that we always need enemies, then we will always need writers of fiction to encode our fears and fantasies.”
—Daniel Easterman (b. 1949)
“A predilection for genre fiction is symptomatic of a kind of arrested development.”
—Thomas M. Disch (b. 1940)
“A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send cheques to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)