To Kill A Mockingbird Innocence

Hook- Rosa Parks said, “You must never be fearful about what you are doing when it is right”, and that’s just what figures during the Civil Rights era embodied, as well as the characters seen in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. History Summary- The 1950’s and 60’s were years of the Civil Rights movement in America that brought great change to the United States of America for the better. While women hungered and sought for independence, African-Americans and immigrants were working to tear down the walls of segregation American society had shoved in their faces. Book Summary- Although the setting of To Kill a Mockingbird was in the 1930’s, when America experienced the Great Depression, Harper Lee wrote and published it in 1960, when the

History displayed this throughout its many tales, but especially during the Civil Rights era of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Concrete Detail- A mass destruction of innocence occurred in the Birmingham Children's Crusade of 1963, when police attacked thousands of adolescents, because they left their schools to march for civil rights. Commentary- The innocence of these children, usually labeled as ignorance by society, is what allowed them to stay blind to the racial inequalities of society, and stand up for what they blatantly saw as the right thing to do. They witnessed black people being unjustly treated, and they marched from their schools to show their protest. Quote- Freeman Hrabowski, a freshman at Ullman High School during the march, said, "I guess you could say I learned an early lesson from a Birmingham jail, if I had to do it all over again, I would do the very same thing." Commentary- Because of their innocence, the children knew to treat all people equally, no matter their skin color, but police and grown men destroyed it. This incident showed how true sagacity came from child-like innocence, but that society killed this probity and left adults staring at a world of mixed morals. Closing- While the adults handled situations as if they were in shades of gray, the children saw the right thing to do in stark black and white, only because their innocence had made them wiser than their