To Kill A Mockingbird Mob Mentality

“The Great Depression was a time of devastation and uncertainty. After the stock market crashed in October 1929, millions of Americans lost their jobs and homes” this article and quote helped Harper Lee to write the famous novel To Kill a Mockingbird (McCabe 12). The central idea of this paper will focus on historical influences in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird for example, The Great Depression because it was taken place in this time period. All the historical influences covered in this paper will be the Jim Crow laws, mob mentality, and lastly the Scottsboro trials.

One of the influences in Harper Lee’s book To Kill a Mockingbird is The Jim Crow laws. These laws were “The name of the racial caste system operated primarily, but not exclusively

I can conclude that mob mentality is the thinking of a person, that doing wrong things with a group is fine because it is a group rather than being alone (Edmonds). The photograph of the lynching, if top part covered looks just like a county fair. This shows just how cruel it was, people gathered around to watch it because they saw other people doing it. The lynching happened so quickly that more and more people kept coming to the act. They did not even think it was bad anymore because their state of mind was saying other people are here so it is okay, but in reality lynchings are very brutal and should not be seen as entertainment (Beitler). After listening to the Radio Diary I conclude that the people were describing how harsh lynchings were, they also viewed it as nothing but just an event. People were so caught up in mob mentality, thinking everyone else is watching so it is okay (“Strange Fruit: Anniversary of a Lynching”). Both articles about mob mentality showed that it is the thinking of a group of people who think it is okay to do bad things together such as causing a riot at a sporting event all together (Smith; Edmonds). In conclusion mob mentality is very bad, do not get caught up with bad events just because other people are doing it. There are many examples of where mob mentality shows up in To Kill a Mockingbird, but here is one example. When Atticus is sitting in front of the

The Scottsboro trials were trials of 9 black boys ages 12-17. These young men were all accused of rape by two women who were already in trouble with the law (Anderson). Things that led up to the trials were all of these young men and women were on a train to hitch a ride. The black men were in a different train car than the women, despite the women still accused them of rape. As the men were getting off the train the women screamed “Rape” and the young men were immediately taken by police (Anderson). Soon enough these black young men were taken to trial in court for being accused of rape. The trial was 1-3 days for a total of 9 people, which proves that people think less of black people than whites because white trials were usually longer than a few days (Johnson). During the trials a doctor said there was no evidence of rape on either of the two women, but he never went to court to have a say and help out these young men (Johnson). At the trials, no one seemed to care about the black men’s side of the story even if the judge knew the crime never happened. Anderson stated, “One lawyer was seeing butterflies and one was trying to catch butterflies.” (Anderson). Which means that the black men had very poor lawyers and had an even worse chance than they already have of winning their case. Sadly enough after the trials, eight out of the nine boys were executed while the other