To Kill a Mockingbird as a case study for American racial prejudice

This thesis investigates the impact of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) on American race relations during the 1950s and 1960s, with the goal of highlighting its most relevant themes, and demonstrating both its positive role and its controversial afterlife in the turbulent context of the civil rights era. The analysis of the most significant aspects of racial segregation during the Jim Crow system and the Civil Rights era contributes to the creation of the background required to assess the significance of the novel and its outcomes. William Wilson’s article “Class Conflict and Jim Crow Segregation in the Postbellum South” (1976) and Randall Kennedy’s “Martin Luther King’s Constitution: A Legal History of the Montgomery Bus Boycott” (1989) provide historical foundations to explore the history of 1950s America; and David Farber’s book The Age of Great Dreams (1994), as well as Michael Heale’s The Sixties in America. History, Politics, Protest (2001), have been useful for understanding the social changes of the 1960s in the US. Claudia Durst Johnson’s book Understanding To Kill a Mockingbird: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources and Historic Documents (1994), Patrick Chura’s article “Prolepsis and Anachronism: Emmett Till and the Historicity of To Kill a Mockingbird” (2000), Andrea Søgnen Tveit’s dissertation “The political use of nostalgia in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird” (2020) have been key sources for their in-depth explorations of Lee’s novel; Naa Baako Ako-Adjei’s article “Why It’s Time Schools Stopped Teaching To Kill a Mockingbird” (2017), Isaac Saney’s “The case against To Kill a Mockingbird” (2003) and Michael Macaluso’s “Teaching To Kill a Mockingbird To Coming to Terms With Race, Racism and America’s Novel” (2017) have helped me explore the critiques the novel received and the controversy it generated upon its publication. The first chapter explores the historical context of the 1950s and 1960s in America, examining the repercussions of Jim Crow on society and highlighting the important role of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Then, I discuss the development of the Civil Rights Movement analysing key moments such as the Freedom Rides and the Civil Rights Act. The second chapter outlines the impact of Lee’s novel on its context of production, focussing on the important themes developed through the novel and its connection with the historical context. Then, I highlight the controversial afterlife of the novel, demonstrating the latest interpretations advanced against Lee’s book.