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:
“The private detective of fiction is a fantastic creation who acts and speaks like a real man. He can be completely realistic in every sense but one, that one sense being that in life as we know it such a man would not be a private detective.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“... if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us to break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“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)