1. Introductory information before reading To Kill a Mockingbird
The Great Depression
Introductory information before reading To Kill a Mockingbird

2. The Great Depression
The Great Depression began with the stock market crash on October 29, 1929, also known as Black Tuesday.
The Depression had devastating effects in the US, and around the world.

3. Street scene on Black Tuesday

4. People who had gone to bed with thousands of dollars in the bank woke up to discover that they only had the money in their pockets.

5. Car for sale in New York

6. People in the Plains States were particularly hard hit with a severe drought, dust storms, and the Depression.
Many came west to find work. So many migrated from Oklahoma, they become known as “Okies.”

7. The “Okies” were also trying to escape the “Dust Bowl,” a series of dust storms that caused major agricultural damage to the Great Plains from 1930 to At times, the clouds blackened the sky all the way to California. Millions of acres of farmland became useless, and hundreds of thousands of families were forced to leave their homes.

8. Families
on the
road,
traveling
west.

9. Leaving South Dakota for Oregon

10. Okies driving to California

11. Migrant families camped out

12. Cooking supper in a shanty, a temporary home

13. Farmers sometimes allowed migrant workers and families to camp while they were harvesting crops. This often led to “squatter camps” where people began living in thrown-together shacks.
Squatter’s shack

14. 18 year old mother at a migrant camp

15. A school for migrant worker’s kids

16. Christmas dinner for a migrant family

17. Breadlines
became
common, as
people
struggled to
feed
themselves
and
their families

18. Jobs were scarce as the unemploy-ment levels soared

19. Migrant workers camp

20. Dorothea Lange’s photo, “Migrant Mother,” perhaps the most famous image from the Great Depression

21. To Kill a Mockingbird
This novel was written by Harper Lee in The story takes place during the early 1930s in the small town of Maycomb, Alabama. During the 1930s, the Great Depression was still going on (having started in 1929), and racism was rampant. Racism was particularly strong in the South, which is where the novel takes place.