Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama, a tiny town about halfway between Montgomery and Mobile, where her next-door neighbor and best friend was the pre-pubescent Truman Capote. Her father -- a lawyer and the basis for Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird -- served in the Alabama legislature from 1927 to He was reportedly a staunch segregationist until the late 1950s, when the increasing civil rights protests caught his attention and sympathies. Despite popular assumption, the family are not distant descendants of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Lee attended three colleges, studied law, and was briefly an exchange student at Oxford, but she received no degrees. By the 1950s she was working as an airline reservations clerk, writing in her free time, until she received a remarkable Christmas present from friends -- a year's wages, without having to work. She argued that they could not afford such generosity, but they insisted that with her talent and a year without distraction, something wonderful would result – which ended up being To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee accompanied her old friend Capote as he trekked to Kansas researching In Cold Blood, and she was so deeply involved in that book's creation that by some accounts she deserved co-author credit. Capote was the inspiration for the neighbor boy 'Dill' in To Kill A Mockingbird, and he said that a character in his Other Voices, Other Rooms was based on Lee. Now in her 80s, Lee lives with her sister Louise, eschews all publicity, declines all interview requests, and rarely makes public appearances. Harper Lee

Jim Crow Laws The racial concerns that Harper Lee addresses in To Kill a Mockingbird began long before her story starts and continued long after. In order to sift through the many layers of prejudice that Lee exposes in her novel, the reader needs to understand the complex history of race relations in the South. Many states — particularly in the South — passed "Jim Crow" laws Many whites at the time believed that instead of progressing as a race, blacks were regressing with the abolition of slavery. Southern churches frequently upheld this racist thinking, which also helped give the Jim Crow laws some of their power. Ironically, African-American churches were as likely to uphold the Jim Crow laws as white churches were. - mostly psychological - find ways to deal with oppression Jim Crow laws extended into almost every facet of public life. - restrooms - barbers - seats on public transportation - pools - athletic teams - water fountains

Scottsboro Trials Lee may have gotten the inspiration for Tom Robinson's case from the Scottsboro Trials of In the Scottsboro case, two white women accused nine black men of raping them as they traveled from Tennessee to Alabama. Both of the women, the nine black men, and two white men hopped a freight car and headed south. (During the Great Depression, jobs were scarce, and the unemployed frequently rode from place to place in empty boxcars in search of work. Although unemployment among blacks was much higher — and in spite of the Jim Crow laws — blacks and whites ultimately competed for the same jobs, a fact that whites greatly resented.) During the train ride the two groups of men fought, and the white men were forced off the train. When the rest of the hobos arrived in Alabama, they were arrested for vagrancy. Both women were of questionable background; one was a known prostitute. They used the ideal of Southern womanhood as their "Get Out of Jail Free Card" and accused the nine African Americans of rape. Although a doctor's examination revealed no signs of any sort of struggle, eight of the nine men were sentenced to death. The Supreme Court ordered a second trial for the Scottsboro "boys," during which one of the women recanted her testimony, denying that she or the other woman had been raped. Nonetheless, the eight men were convicted a second time. The appeals process continued for several years. Some of the men escaped prison, others were paroled. The last man was released from prison in 1950; one of the men received a pardon in Because of deep-rooted anti-black sentiment, two white women with skeletons in their own closets were able to deprive eight men of several years of their lives.

Civil Rights Movement The black community had shown spurts of enthusiasm in pursuing civil rights since the end of slavery. By the 1950s, however, the latest interest in the Civil Rights movement had lost a good deal of steam. Many African Americans seemed resigned to accepting the Jim Crow laws and living within the existing system. Educated blacks in Alabama were looking for something to rekindle the interest in Civil Rights amongst the black community. They found that "something" in a woman named Rosa Parks. On a December day in 1955, Parks boarded a full Montgomery, Alabama bus, tired after a long day's work. She sat at the back of the bus's white section. When a white person boarded, the bus driver ordered Parks and several other black riders to move, and she refused. Her subsequent arrest mobilized the African-American community into a yearlong bus boycott that ultimately ended segregation on public transportation. Parks was an educated woman who was concerned about the plight of Southern blacks. Although she did not board the bus intending to take a stand, when the opportunity arose, she accepted the challenge. When the Supreme Court overturned Alabama's segregation laws regarding public transportation, the Civil Rights movement gained momentum. Martin Luther King, Jr., a Montgomery, Alabama minister, rose as the recognized leader of the movement. Several women worked behind the scenes organizing the boycott and keeping the movement alive.