To Kill A Mockingbird Impact On Society

How The World Wrote A Book For An Author

“It was Jem’s turn to cry. His face was streaked with angry tears…[Society] “It ain’t right,”’ (To Kill A Mockingbird pg 212). Society, it has determined all the people who have lived from America’s beginning until now. There are many different ways society can affect people, by changing their behavior, how they speak and act, or how people think about others. To Kill A Mockingbird, written by Harper Lee, is an historical fiction that tells the story of society in the 1930’s. There are countless characteristics of society that have influenced this book. One characteristic of society is segregation, whites vs. blacks. Back in 1930 was normal, blacks were not equal to the whites. They were below them

In the book To Kill A Mockingbird, this happens throughout the city of Maycomb Alabama. There was a huge social struggle between the colored folk and the white folk in maycomb. For instance black citizens could not sit in the same area of the courthouse as the white citizens during Tom Robinson's trial, “The Negroes, having waited for the white people to go upstairs began to come in.” (To Kill A Mockingbird pg 163). The black citizens not only had to sit up in the balcony, but they had to wait for all the white people to sit down before they could even enter the building This shows how those who were of colored skin were separated from the white folks. Another example from the book is the colored people could not and did not live anywhere near the white neighborhoods, they lived behind the city dump. In the same fashion there were many state laws that were put into place to separate the colored people from the whites even more. To demonstrate, there was a law from Missouri saying, “Separate free schools shall be established for the education of children of African descent; and it shall be unlawful for any colored child to attend any white school, or any white child to attend a colored school.” (Jim Crow Laws) This shows clearly that even states wanted to keep people of

Inequality goes hand and hand with segregation. That means that they were seen as lower or less valuable than those of different races. The most compelling evidence from the book that points right to this issue is simply the fact that colored people did not live in the nice neighborhood, they did not live in the nice homes, they as mentioned before lived in a shack behind the city dump. Colored people, to put into better terms, were thought more as property than anything else, they were looked down upon as less than a human being. They were the ones to do the hard dirty jobs that no one wanted to do. Another point often overlooked is black people were always thought of as dumber. In this case black people were not allowed to go to the nice schools. This being said the colored people obviously got the lower education because they were not allowed to go to the nice schools like the whites. Adding on to that black children did not go to school in the book they simply helped their mom or dad on the farm or in the house, because they did not have enough time or money to send them to school. The last key point about inequality is they were always thought of as wrong. A big piece of evidence is shown in the book, when Tom Robinson was on trial. The jury thought he was guilty when the only evidence that showed