To Kill a Mockingbird
By Harper Lee
SETTING OF THE NOVEL
• Southern United States
• 1930’s
– Great Depression
– Prejudice and legal segregation
– Ignorance
1930’s - Great Depression began
when the stock market crashed in
October, 1929
• The Effect of the Wall Street Crash:
-People saved money, withdrew money from banks, banks collapsed,
and companies went bankrupt.
• Businesses failed, factories closed:
– People were out of work
– Even people with money suffered because nothing was being
produced for sale.
•
As a result, people lost their homes, were forced to “live
off the land.”
Social and Economic Climate of
the 1930s
The Rise of Unemployment
There are three different social
classes present in the south
during this time
• In “To Kill a Mockingbird”, we see the
white side of town, the black side of town,
and the “white trash” side of town.
• There are characters from each area of town
that we encounter and witness their
relationship with one another.
“White trash”
• Poor, uneducated white people who lived on
“relief”
– lowest social class, even below the poor blacks
– prejudiced against black people
– felt the need to “put down” blacks in order to
elevate themselves
Racial prejudice was alive & well.
Although slavery had ended in 1864,
old ideas were slow to change.
Racial separation (segregation)
Racial Segregation
Racial Segregation
Prejudice in the novel
Race
Gender
Handicaps
Rich/Poor
Age
Religion
Effects of Unemployment
• Hoboing was common during the Depression.
• For some, riding freight trains was an appealing adventure compared
to the drudgery and dreariness of their daily lives. Others hopped rail
cars to move from one fruitless job search to the next.
Unemployment:
The relation to the novel
• On March 25, 1931, two dozen or so mainly young white males rode
the Southern Railroad's Chattanooga to Memphis freight train.
•
Among them were four black Chattanooga teenagers hoping to
investigate a rumor of government jobs in Memphis hauling logs on
the river and five other black teens from various parts of Georgia.
•
Four young whites, two males and two females dressed in overalls,
also rode the train, returning to Huntsville from unsuccessful job
searches in the cotton mills of Chattanooga.
Scottsboro Trial
• Very famous trial in American history
• A crime that never occurred but led to many trials, convictions, reversals,
and retrials.
• In 1931, nine black teenage boys were accused of ran alleged gang rape
by two white girls (these were the passengers on the train).
• Their trial lasted six years and during this time the men were kept in jail.
Despite the fact that one of the girls changed her testimony and claimed
that the rape had not ever occurred, five of the nine were convicted of
rape.
• Over the course of the two decades that followed, the struggle for justice
of the "Scottsboro Boys," as the black teens were called, made them wellknown, launched and ended careers, wasted lives, produced heroes,
opened southern juries to blacks, intensified sectional strife, and divided
America's political left.
Legal Issues of the 1930’s which
impact the story
• Women given the vote
in 1920
• Juries were MALE
and WHITE
• “Fair trial” did not
include acceptance of
a black man’s word
against a white man’s
Gender Bias (Prejudice)
• Women were considered “weak”
• Women were generally not educated for
occupations outside the home
• In wealthy families, women were expected
to oversee the servants and entertain guests
• Men were not considered capable of
nurturing children
Plessy vs. Furgeson
1896- U. S. Supreme Court Case that established the “separate but equal”
ruling, justifying and greatly perpetuating segregation in the South.
The state of Louisiana passed a law that required separate
accommodations for blacks and whites on railroads.
Homer Plessy tested this law when he bought a first class ticket on an all
white train. When asked to get up, he declined and was arrested.
Plessy lost when the judge, John Ferguson, ruled that the state had the
right to regulate the R.R. companies.
The law separating the two races was acceptable
as a matter of public policy