Here you will find resources to further your understanding of what life was like for the characters in 'To Kill a Mockingbird'. You will find information on The Scottsboro Boys, The Jim Crow Laws, The Civil Rights Movement, The Freedom Riders and The Great Depression.
The Scottsboro Boys were nine African American teenagers accused in Alabama of raping two White American women on a train in 1931. The landmark set of legal cases from this incident dealt with racism and the right to a fair trial.
The Great Depression lasted from 1929 to 1939, and was the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world. It began after the stock market crash of October 1929, which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors. Over the next several years, consumer spending and investment dropped, causing steep declines in industrial output and employment as failing companies laid off workers. By 1933, when the Great Depression reached its lowest point, some 15 million Americans were unemployed and nearly half the country’s banks had failed. Click below to learn more.
Nearly 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, African Americans in Southern states still inhabited a starkly unequal world of disenfranchisement, segregation and various forms of oppression, including race-inspired violence. The link below provides some excellent information.
Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. ... They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities in the states of the former Confederate States of America, starting in 1896 with a "separate but equal" status for African Americans in railroad cars.
On May 4, 1961, a group of 13 African-American and white civil rights activists launched the Freedom Rides, a series of bus trips through the American South to protest segregation in interstate bus terminals. The Freedom Riders, who were recruited by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a U.S. civil rights group, departed from Washington, D.C., and attempted to integrate facilities at bus terminals along the way into the Deep South. African-American Freedom Riders tried to use “whites-only” restrooms and lunch counters, and vice versa. In September 1961, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued regulations prohibiting segregation in bus and train stations nationwide.
