What role does race play in the crime?

A major theme of A Time to Kill is racial prejudice. The painful legacy of the antebellum South and the Jim Crow era, and all of the residual structural and institutional obstacles that remain in the "New South" at the time of the novel's setting, constitute the central thematic material of the novel. The reason Cobb and Willard target Tonya in the first place is because she is a Black girl, and they feel that they can attack her, even kill her, with impunity, and that the community will do nothing to bring her justice. In fact, Grisham demonstrates the clear difference in boundaries for Cobb when it comes to white women and Black women (and children). He writes, "They had been at the lake most of the day, where Cobb had a friend with a boat and some extra girls who were supposed to be easy but turned out to be untouchable. Cobb had been generous with his drugs and beer, but the girls did not reciprocate. Frustrated, they left the lake and were driving to no place in particular when they happened across the girl" (4). These "untouchable" girls, implied to be white women by the circumstances of their casually associating with Cobb and Willard, are shown to have agency enough in the eyes of Cobb and Willard to deny sexual contact with them. Tonya, conversely, is not given that choice.