In July of 1960 a lady named Harper Lee decided to publish a book that would affect society in ways that she never even imagined. To Kill a Mockingbird, released at the height of the civil rights movement, changed the way people saw each other and themselves. Back then a lot of people did not completely understand life in the South, and they looked down upon it. However, her novel delivered a point of view that people had never seen from before, and opened their eyes to the discrimination and mistreatment that African Americans were being put through. The book takes place in 1930's Alabama, in the midst of the Great Depression. It is narrated by a young girl named Scout Finch who retells her experiences as a child when her father was defending …show more content…
The Great Depression, the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world was at its lowest point in 1933, the beginning of the book. Over 15 million Americans were unemployed, and half of the country's banks had failed, malnutrition was a big problem for children due to their parents not being able to afford food for them, and many families were evicted from the houses or lands that they lived on. During this period, most African Americans worked on farms that were owned by white landowners and lived in rural areas. While life before the Great Depression was already arduous for African Americans, their living conditions worsened due to the fact that the farmers they worked for lost their land. As previously mentioned, food prices had deflated causing farmers to not be able to make a profit off of their land. Subsequently, they would not sell the crops that they produced, which was not a lot because along with the Great Depression the Dust Bowl was also taking place. The Dust Bowl was a massive drought in the middle portion of the country, while it did not affect Alabama where the story took place, it was a detriment to many families. As a consequence of the Dust Bowl many farms produced a small amount of crop, and it contributed to the money deflation of Great