The Civil Rights Movement In Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird

Harper Lee’s novel To Kill A Mockingbird and Eugenia Coolliers short story “Marigolds” evoke the most empathy by showing the growth of morals like empathy and compassion in the characters. The dynamic characters are used to emphasize how a person can change while symbolism is used to show a deeper meaning in an object both are used by the authors to evoke empathy. To Kill A Mockingbird, a novel published in 1960 about innocence, compassion and hatred. A story about children living in a racist time period trying to get through living there childhood without being influenced by the bad customs. “Marigolds” by Eugenia Cooliers is a short story also written in the 1960’s about a learning compassion and turning into a woman. Lee and Cooliers both inform the reader about the kindness towards humanity that was formed in Scout and Lizabeth. Both authors use a similar style of writing to evoke empathy in the reader.

We all use persuasion in our daily lives, whether it be to convince our friends or for Atticus he has to persuade a jury and a room full racist people. He does this by using ethos and pathos. There is also persuasion in the book itself, convincing the reader that racism is wrong and we need to treat everyone equality no matter of their culture or race.

American history is a sad and bloody history with many bumps that have created it into the superpower it is today. This hardship from our history played a crucial part in many books and especially To Kill A Mockingbird. Harper Lee created a writing masterpiece by using real life events as well as using real life corrupted laws. Connections like the Jim Crow laws, the mob mentality, and issues of racism that were taking place in that time.

Throughout the 1800s and early 1900s, racism was still a huge part in our society and this is demonstrated through the Scottsboro Trial and the novel To Kill a Mockingbird. The first place this is shown, was after everybody heard about the supposed rape of the white girls. There were protests and tons of people showing hate towards the black men. Another example of this, was all the assumptions white people made, that the only logical explanation for the incident was that the black men raped the white girls. This assumption was without listening to the evidence or facts proving the man's innocence during the trial. Using the evidence from the Scottsboro case and from To kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee clearly portrayed the racism that was still going on at that time throughout her book.

Mockingbirds symbolize innocence, and the idea of killing a mockingbird signifies destroying its innocence. In the book “To kill a mockingbird” by Harper Lee, many of the characters can be identified as mockingbirds. They are the innocent people who have been harmed or tainted by evil. This is usually due to inequality. In the novel, there are many examples of inequality. There is social, gender, and racial inequality shown throughout the chapters. The characters and community displayed in the book are extremely prejudiced and racist while the book demonstrates that some people are considered more worthy than others based on their skin color, their gender, or their place in society.

The first influence on Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird are the Jim Crow laws. The Jim Crow laws were cruel to colored people. “Jim Crow laws were an official effort to keep African Americans separate from Whites in the southern United States for many years” (“Jim Crow Laws”1). The Jim Crow laws were put in place to keep Blacks below Whites. People thought that they needed theses laws because they did not believe that there where equal to them. The Whites thought that the Blacks should be below them and they needed the laws to keep it that way.Many times if a Jim Crow law was not followed by a person of color they would be lynched. Lynchings were public, often sadistic, murders carried out by mobs. Between 1882, when the first reliable data were collected, and 1968, when lynchings had become rare, there were 4,730 known lynchings, including 3,440 black men and women.

Many people have different opinions on racism, and To Kill a Mockingbird demonstrates this in many different ways. Harper Lee’s novel was based off of real-life events from the 1930s. The book included examples of the Jim Crow laws, mob mentality, and racism.

"To Kill a Mockingbird" is a novel by Harper Lee, and was written as an educational novel. It was published in 1960 and in 1961 won the Pulitzer Prize. The plot and characters are based on the observations of the author of her neighbors when she was ten years old. The novel is known for its humor and warmth, despite the serious situations of things like rape and racism. The father of the narrator, Atticus Finch, has become a model of morality for many readers, as well as an example of an honest lawyer. He shows human courage, which gives us the idea that Atticus is a common and inconspicuous man he is represented from the eyes of the children, who are getting some heat from all his actions. There is an idea in the novel that children have a sense of justice and become prejudice only under the influence of others. This idea comes from a lawyer Atticus, a man of honor, who is doing good although he isn’t expected to. His arguments for heroism are “I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It 's when you know you 're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what”(Lee 115).

In the book To Kill a Mockingbird, there are three characters who symbolize mockingbirds by their outgoing qualities. These characters try to make peace between races in Maycomb County and stop the prejudice and hate between each race. A mockingbird is a song bird that displays peace and creates wonderful music for the world to enjoy, therefore like Miss Maudie stated, "Mockingbirds do not do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They do not eat up people's gardens, do not nest in corncribs, they do not do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That is why it is a sin to kill a mockingbird" (90). Throughout this book these three characters use their qualities to make a mark on society, make peace between races, and do not deserve to be harmed because they simulate mockingbirds.

One of the ways Harper Lee relates to conflict in real life are the Jim Crow laws and shows us that they were very unfair. The Jim Crow laws were very unfair to all the African Americans and it made the white people more superior than the African Americans. The Jim Crow laws were unfair because the blacks could not eat with the whites, the African Americans could not show love affection with their partners in public (Pilgrim). Another reason they were unfair was because at every intersection people had the right away no matter what (Pilgrim). In To Kill a Mockingbird, there is evidence of the Jim Crow laws because of many reasons. One of the reasons is that Calpurnia and the Finch family go to different churches on Sunday. “Lula stopped,

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is a silent protest to the Jim Crow Laws. The Jim Crow Laws were, and still are, a series of laws that prohibit African-Americans from doing certain things. Many of our Great Grandparents can still remember what they were like, if they liked it or not, which would depend on the person. Some whites would say that the laws were good, but that they should’ve been taken away sooner, or even not at all. This would be completely opposite of what an African-American would say. They would say that it was stupid and wrong in the first place, which it was. They would say that it hurt them and they were offended, as it should have. They would say that they were hurt, that we are all humans and should be treated

Harper Lee has shown us many examples of racism that were present in her novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. She has shown us how challenging it was for the characters to survive in this “black versus white” society. Her bestseller was not only influenced by the Civil Rights movement, but it was also influenced by her youth and culture. Her life and narration in the novel share many similarities with Scout Finch, in that they both had to overcome the struggles of living in a racist

In the book “To Kill a Mockingbird”, Harper Lee opened our eyes to how unfairly African Americans were treated in the 1930’s. The society Lee grew up in had a lot of racism and segregation. This society affected her in many ways that we can see throughout her book.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee takes place in the small quiet southern town of Maycomb, Alabama in the 1930's where the only excitement that happened was kids messing with the legend of Boo Radley. That was until a young African-American man, Tom Robinson, was accused of raping a white girl, but not just any white girl, but a Ewell. The oldest daughter from the poorest family in Maycomb county. Because of the place and time period, there was a lot of inequality between people, especially if your black.

Racism is the belief that one race possesses inherent traits that make that particular race superior to other races. In 1900s, black people were treated cruelly, and even got killed because of racism. They were considered inferior to the white race. People used to judge each other based on their skin color, and race. The society used to turn a blind eye to the racial problems. Inspired by Jim Crow Laws, Scottsboro Trial, and the African American Church Burning American novelist Harper Lee wrote her book To Kill a Mockingbird to portray the injustices and discrimination black people faced back in the 1900s.