Text and Context in to Kill a Mockingbird

'Texts are a product of their context.' Discuss the key issues of one set text and how they reflect context'.

"Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don't pretend to understand." Atticus Finch

These words from Atticus Finch sum up the context of Harper Lee's novel 'To Kill a Mockingbird'.

When we refer to context we are talking about the space in which an event, or in this case a novel, occurs or is written. What was happening in the bigger picture? What was the author experiencing? What was happening in the author's world? What was the author commenting on? What message was the author trying to convey? All based on the context, or the space, in which the novel was written.

In the case of To Kill a Mockingbird, the context was the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s. It was written and published amidst the most significant and conflict-ridden social change in the South since the Civil War and Reconstruction. Despite the 1930s setting To Kill a Mockingbird is told from the perspective of the 1950s.

Despite the end of slavery almost a century before To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960 (President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863), African Americans were still denied many of their basic rights.

Although Harper 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 segregation in public schools unconstitutional and quickly led to desegregation of other public institutions. However, there was still considerable resistance to these changes, and many states, especially those in the South, took years before they fully integrated their schools.

Other ways blacks were demeaned by society included the segregation of public rest rooms and drinking fountains, as well as the practice of forcing blacks to ride in the back of buses. This injustice was challenged by a mild-mannered department store seamstress named Rosa Parks. 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. Along with other black pastors, such as Charles K. Steele and Fred Shuttlesworth, King organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in January, 1957, one of the leading organizations that helped end legal segregation by the mid-1960s.

The same year that Harper 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.

The justice system was similarly discriminatory in the 1950s, as blacks were excluded from juries and could be arrested, tried, and even convicted with little cause. One notable case occurred in 1955, when two white men were charged with the murder of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American youth who had allegedly harassed a white woman. It has been

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