At most, Tom's influence is entirely indirect. It's more what surrounds Tom and his trial, the testimony about what he allegedly did, that begins to change Scout's mind about what her peers and the people in her town believe to be true about Black-Americans. She sits in the courtroom and listens to Mayella tell her tale about how Tom brutally attacked her, and her father, Bob, corroborates her testimony. However, she also hears Tom give...
At most, Tom's influence is entirely indirect. It's more what surrounds Tom and his trial, the testimony about what he allegedly did, that begins to change Scout's mind about what her peers and the people in her town believe to be true about Black-Americans. She sits in the courtroom and listens to Mayella tell her tale about how Tom brutally attacked her, and her father, Bob, corroborates her testimony. However, she also hears Tom give his side of the story, and learns that because of his damaged left arm, he couldn't possibly have inflicted the wounds Mayella and Bob claimed he had. Scout begins to come to her own conclusion that the trial wasn't fair to Tom, and that the treatment of the white folks towards the black population in Maycomb was unjust. The fact that Tom was killed by the police may also have caused Scout to wonder if justice was truly blind. We see her attitudes change as she gets older and sees the hypocrisy in everyone being upset about Hitler's terrorizing of the Jews, but not seeing the horror inflicted on the blacks by Southern whites. So while Scout never spoke to Tom herself, everything that happened to him echoed in her soul.
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