Transcript PowerPoint for pg. 173-175

To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
“A novel of great sweetness, humor, compassion, and of
mystery carefully sustained.” Harper’s Magazine
“Skilled, unpretentious, and totally
ingenuous…tough…acute, funny”
The New Yorker
“I’ve read and taught this book at least twenty-five times,
and each time I learn and treasure something new.”
Mrs. Johnson
Setting: Maycomb, Alabama
1930’s
The Great Depression
Themes in To Kill a Mockingbird
•Coming of Age
•Prejudice
•Courage
•Guilt and Innocence
Everyone was poor
during the Great
Depression.
Jobs and cash were
scarce.
This famous
photograph by
Dorothea Lange was
taken in 1936. It
shows a destitute
mother of 7 children.
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School in rural Alabama (1935)
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A sharecropper family
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Another sharecropper family
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Former slave, 65 years after the end of slavery
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“First of all, if you can learn a
simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along
a lot better with all kinds of folks.
You never really understand a
person until you consider things
from his point of view…until you
climb into his skin and walk around
in it.”
Atticus Finch (30)
What were Jim Crow laws?
Jim Crow laws were racial
segregation laws in the South that
were imposed on African
Americans. They were similar to
Black Codes, which were laws
restricting the movement and
occupations of newly freed slaves
after the Civil War (1861-1865). Jim
Crow laws banned blacks from
such places as restaurants,
hospitals, parks, schools, and
barbershops. As a result, blacks
were required to use separate
facilities or entrances.
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"But there is one way in this country in which all
men are created equal - there is one human
institution that makes a pauper the equal of a
Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an
Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any
college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a
court. It can be the Supreme Court of the United
States, or the humblest J.P. court in the land, or this
honorable court which you serve. Our courts have
their faults, as does any human institution, but in
this country our courts are the great levelers, and in
our courts all men are created equal." (Atticus Finch
defending Tom Robinson)
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Effects of prejudice in the 1940: a school for African-American children.
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1950’s: photograph of an African-American student, newly-integrated into
a formerly segregated school.
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1960’s: the cancer of prejudice continued
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•How do we create a just and fair society?’
•How do we overcome our fears of people we see as
“different”?
•How do we learn to recognize, and transcend, our
prejudices?
•This book can help us to answer these questions.
•Enjoy and learn.