Real Events In To Kill A Mockingbird

The way a person perceives things while they are growing up depends on what side of the event or situation that the individual is on. Although that is true it helps to put it in the other person’s perspective. Harper Lee took this into account while writing To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee gave a real world instance of things that could have happened in real life. Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird , has real world events that shaped how the novel was written, events such as the Scottsboro Trials, The Murder of Emmett Till, and The Great Depression.
One example of a real world event that shaped Harper Lee’s writing To Kill a Mockingbird was the Scottsboro Trials. When Lee was a little girl the ongoing Trials were well known to people in
Emmett Till was a young African American man that was murdered by Roy Bryant and J.W Milam (white men)because he whistled at the wife of Roy Bryant (one of the killers) at their grocery store that they owned. The men were put on trial and looked cherubic with family and kids sitting in the front of the courtroom and were found innocent, though a few days later they put a notice out that they did kill Emmett Till because they could not be tried again for the same crime(A&E). In the novel Tom is treated unfairly by the white people in the community because of the segregation in the south (Lee 159-211). Emmett was treated badly because he was on the bottom of the social ladder a African American child(A&E). An example of this would be that black people had to succumb to the white people and get off the sidewalk even if it was a white child. Emmett was almost unrecognizable when they found him in the river, but his mom asked for the casket to be viewable at his funeral so the people could see what the the men did to her son(A&E). An instance where Tom is treated unfairly is when he is shot seventeen times in the chest while trying to run away (Lee 235). Additionally the fear of “higher authority” influenced Lee’s writing. Emmett Till was very scared when the men showed up at his house in the middle of the night to “take care of business” with the little incident
Lee was growing up in the Great Depression and was affected by it like most of the people in the United States(“Harper”). In the story the time frame is the Great Depression and most families are , an example would be the Cunninghams and how they had to pay Atticus in walnuts for his services (Lee 20-21). Farmers were the most affected because the price of their crops went way down and they still had to get by (Lee 21). While in real life white people still practiced servitude and treated the colored people unfairly. The black community had to worry about being careful with language and actions because of the lynchings and other bad things that were happening to these people that did things they were not supposed to. In the real world there was a lot of things to worry about like taking care of a family and “making ends meet”. In the novel the protagonist family is not impoverished, but other families like the Ewells have to live by the dump and their yard is starting to blend in with the dump. In the fact, Lee lived through the Great Depression, which shows that as a writer it is much stronger and connects with the reader a lot more. In the story there were things that went wrong and the fact that it was during the Great Depression made things even worse. An example of this would be when Atticus and Calpurnia have to go to tell Helen that Tom is dead, not only does she have to live without Tom, she has to