1. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Fifty years following its publication,
Harper Lee’s novel is still chosen close to the top
of any selection of favourite books of all time

2. Harper Lee This is Harper Lee’s only published novel
Lived in Monroeville, Alabama where
author Truman Capote came to spend
the summer. He was the
model for Dill.
She has now become a famous recluse
Where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds
like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.

3. Atticus Finch While Scout narrates the novel, her father Atticus
is the hero of the story and the central character.
He is often selected on lists of the
Greatest Movie Heroes of all time due
to his portrayal by Gregory Peck.
His calm and wise manner make him
an “idealised” parent.

4. Title Remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.
Mockingbirds don’t do one
thing but make music for us
to enjoy.
He likened Tom’s death to
the senseless slaughter of
songbirds by hunters and
children.
It’d be sort of like shooting
A mockingbird, wouldn’t it ?

5. Themes Despite grand courthouses on the town square and public
monuments to justice, racial
(and other forms of) prejudice
is the central theme of the
Novel.
CLASS SYSTEM IN MAYCOMB
Professional people e.g. the Finches
Poor but respectable people
e.g. the Cunninghams
Poor but disreputable (“white
trash”) e.g. the Ewells
Blacks e.g. Tom Robinson
Mr Finch, if you was a nigger like me,
you’d be scared too.

6. Part I of the novel is a study of a small community with the main focus being the childrens’ attempts to get Boo Radley to appear.
Part II becomes a gripping courtroom drama following the trial of the Negro Tom Robinson.
This section of the novel is used in Law Studies as a classic example of measured and courteous courtroom technique.
The courtroom above is in Monroeville, Alabama.

7. Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.
Children are children, but they can spot an
evasion quicker than adults…
The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.
The court appointed Atticus to defend
him. That’s what they didn’t like about
it. It was confusing.
Atticus was speaking so quietly his
last word crashed on our ears.

8. The U.S. Civil War : 1861 – 1865
The Great Depression 1930’s
The South suffered most through its strictly Agricultural economy.
The freedom of slaves was a direct result of the Civil War
A consequence was the breakdown of the Plantation System
The Finches lost their place in Southern “aristocracy” – “The disturbance between North and South left [Scout’s} ancestors stripped of everything but their land”
Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started,
is no reason for us not to try to win.

9. Reconstruction
After the Civil War, racist white southerners formed terrorist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan to maintain white supremacy and restrict the freedom of former slaves.
Federal troops tried to stop such activities but had little success.

10. Lynching
Lynch mobs illegally put African Americans to death in the 1860s and 1870s
The practices were still common in the 1930s which saw 130 recorded lynchings

11. Jim Crow
This referred to the racist laws that denied African Americans their civil rights after the end of Reconstruction until the civil rights movement into the 1950s
By 1910, every state of the former Confederacy had segregated spaces where African Americans and whites might be together

12. Scottsboro Case
Nine black youths and two white women were arrested for ‘riding the rails’. Fearing they would face time in jail for vagrancy, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates accused the youths of rape.
Despite the testimony by doctors that no rape had occurred, the white jury still found the black youths guilty.
The injustice of the Scottsboro case is relected in the trial of Tom Robinson

13. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view….until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.
In 1954, many state statutes forbade Negroes to : serve on white juries, send children to white schools, try on clothing in a store, sit down in a white restaurant, sit in the front of a bus. The few black policemen could not arrest whites.
In 1955, Emmet Till, a black boy from Chicago, was beaten and shot to death for whistling at a white girl.
In 1956, the editor of the Wilmington Star, a newspaper in North Carolina, ordered the photo of a black witness to be removed from his front page story, leaving a very obvious space on the page.
In 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama, Bull Connor ordered his police force to cut off all black marches with fire-hoses, police dogs, and clubs.