How Does Harper Lee Present The Black/Coloured Community In 'To Kill A Mockingbird'

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        Khalid Edah-Tally

How Does Harper Lee Present The Black/Coloured Community In ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’?  

        

        To Kill a Mockingbird tells the story of a white lawyer who defies all others to defend a black man in a rape scandal. This may not sound so strange in present day society; however, in the 1930’s (where the book is set) this was considered a great crime.

        The book was written by Harper Lee during the 1950’s in America, and coincided with the civil rights movement. At this time in history, racism played a very important role in society. There was a lot of racial hatred between black and white civilians, and this ultimately led to skirmishes and fatalities.  

        It is set in a small town called Maycomb, in Alabama, one of the Southern States. Although Maycomb is a fictitious place based on Lee’s own home town of Monroeville, real places and towns such as Montgomery are referred to in the novel. As I mentioned above, there are a lot of factors which explain the attitudes of the people towards each other throughout the book.

        Between 1933 and 1935, there was an economic depression within America, and more importantly, within its more poverty stricken states. This caused many shares to suddenly decrease and lose value, and subsequently poverty swept the country. But perhaps the most influencing factor for Harper Lee was the Black Civil Rights Movement in the late 1950’s. This in my view led to Lee’s novel, which is a mixture of nostalgia, criticism and perhaps guilt-typical of a white Southern American author of the time.

        Also, the apartheid played an important role in the novel. The apartheid was a social system enforced by the white governments in the twentieth-century. Under apartheid, black majority of people were segregated and were denied political and economic rights equal to those of whites. This included such things as black people sitting at the back of busses, away from white citizens. In Maycomb, we see an apartheid like effect throughout the story, and much more in the Tom Robinson trial sequence. We even hear of blacks living in separate quarters to white people, and this creates a sort of stereotype of blacks.

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Maycomb is a small town within Alabama itself, and was microcosm (sort of representative) of American society during the 1930’s. It is a town concerned in its own matters and dilemmas, and we do not hear anything about the rest of Alabama or in America throughout the entire novel. The novel, in a way makes a social comment that black people should be treated with the same rights and responsibilities as white people. This is turn created a sort of fear towards black people, as they were thought to be very dangerous people.

        

        During the novel, ...

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