Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird

"To Kill a Mocking Bird" by Harper Lee was published in 1960 and was

adapted into a play by Christopher Sergal and published in 1980. It

tells the story of a court case when a black man gets accused of

raping a white woman. The black man, Tom Robinson is defended by the a

lawyer called Atticus Finch. Atticus is one of the few people in

Maycome who have a bit of money an can read and write very well. The

inevitable outcome of the case was that the Black man was sentenced to

death.

The play is set in 1935 during the Great Depression and in times of

Poverty and Unemployment. Maycome is a rural farming community and the

Great Depression has hit them hard. The law is very unfair to Blacks

because they issue different sentences to White people then to Black

people. For example in a court case that court would be made up of all

white men. The community is divided as well because all Black services

are separate from White services. E.G. Education, money, churches,

funerals, graveyards, medical services. However poor a White person

is, a Black person would always be lower than the poor white person in

the social scale. In the Deep South a man was expected to do manly

jobs like Hunting, Carpentry, Farrier and a Blacksmith. Atticus is

seamed to different than the other men because he is a lawyer and

reads books, unlike most of the other men who do the jobs described

above.

The Deep South came to be like this because of the slavery White

people enforced on the Blacks. In 1619 the first black people were

brought to America and then in 1661, Virginia legalised slavery, along

with lots of other Deep South states. 35-40 million Blacks were

brought to be slaves over 300 years, o...

... middle of paper ...

... up, knowing what Atticus has proved and said damn you ta..." because

and every one else knows that it was Bob who hit Mayella because he is

left handed. To prove this even more Atticus reminds the court that

Bob signed that piece of paper with his left and that Tom took his

oath with his only good hand - his right. The next part of Atticus'

summing up says about the views of the people in the Deep South,

saying about people thinking that all Negroes are bad and all Negroes

lie but they all don't and all races lie and are bad sometimes and not

just the blacks.

"To kill a mockingbird" is a prime example of what life was like

during the Great Depression in the Deep South, full of discrimination

and social scales determining what people were like and how they would

act. I think the story is a very good because of how it describes life

during that period.