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:
“If there were genders to genres, fiction would be unquestionably feminine.”
—William Gass (b. 1924)
“It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
“We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives. Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance. To write a true work of fiction even is only to take leisure and liberty to describe some things more exactly as they are.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)