To Kill A Mockingbird Research Paper

Dec13 Despite the end of slavery almost a century before To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960—President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863—African Americans were still denied many of their basic rights. Although Lee sets her novel in the South of the 1930s, conditions were little improved by the early 1960s in America. The civil rights movement was just taking shape in the 1950s, and its principles were beginning to find a voice in American courtrooms and the law. The famous 1954 U.S. Supreme Court trial of Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas declared the long-held practice of segregationin public schools unconstitutional and quickly led to desegregation of other public institutions.

This injustice was challenged by a mild-mannered department store seamstress named Rosa Parks (1913-2005). After she was arrested for failing to yield her seat to a white passenger, civil rights leaders began a successful boycott of the bus system in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 5, 1955. The principal leader of the boycott was the reverend Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968). In January 1957, King and other black pastors, such as Charles K. Steele (1914-1980) and Fred Shuttlesworth (1922-2011), organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, one of the leading organizations that helped end legal segregation by the mid-1960s. The same year that Lee won a contract for the unfinished manuscript of To Kill a Mockingbird, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which provided penalties for the violation of voting rights and created the Civil Rights Commission. African Americans would not see protection and enforcement of all of their rights until well into the next decade, when the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Civil Rights Bill of 1968 were passed. These laws banned racial discrimination from public places, workplaces, polling places, and

One notable case occurred in 1955, when two white men were charged with the murder of Emmett Till (1941-1955), a fourteen-year-old African American who had allegedly harassed a white woman. Like the jury in Tom Robinson's trial, the jury for the Till case was all white and all male; the trial was also held in a segregated courtroom. Although the defense's case rested on the unlikely claims that the corpse could not be specifically identified as Till and that the defendants had been framed, the jury took only one hour to acquit the men of all charges. The men later admitted their crimes to a journalist in great detail but were never punished for the murder.

The novel is renowned for its warmth and humor, despite dealing with the serious issues of rape and racial inequality. The narrator's father,Atticus Finch, has served as a moral hero for many readers and as a model of integrity for lawyers. One critic explains the novel's impact by writing, "In the twentieth century, To Kill a Mockingbird is probably the most widely read book dealing with race in America, and its protagonist, Atticus Finch, the most enduring fictional image of racial