To Kill A Mockingbird Documentary
Storyboard Text
- Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird
- Does the novel represent the voice of America?
- A Northview Documentary
- "Shoot all the bluejays you want ... but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."
- To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel set in the 1930s during the Jim Crow era after slavery had ended, but blacks were still treated as second class citizens in America.
- The novel centers around the trial of an innocent black man, Tom Robinson, who is accused of raping a teenage white girl in the fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama. Atticus Finch is the brave, white lawyer who stands up to prejudice and injustice to represent Tom in court.
- In the South during the 1930s, African Americans did not have much of a voice to speak out against prejudice and injustice because they fear retaliation.
- In this novel, it was the voice of Atticus and his children, Scout and Jem, who spoke for them.Atticus preaches to Scout, "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around."
- Interview with a teacher.How many years have you taught To Kill a Mockingbird?Why do you feel it is so important to teach?Do you think it still represents the voice of America today?
- The setting for the novel was similar to Lee's hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, and its fictional court case was inspired by actual events that occurred in the South during her own childhood according to Dara Lusk of the Utah Statesman.
- In 1931, the Scottsboro Boys were nine African American teenagers wrongfully accused and convicted in Alabama of attacking and raping two white teenage girls. Medical evidence proved the attacks and rapes did not occur, but all but the youngest boy was sentenced to death.
- Walter Lett was tried and convicted of raping a white woman in Monroeville, Alabama, in 1934. Despite a lack of any evidence, he was sentenced to death by a prejudice all white jury.
- Dara Lusk also points out that the realism of Tom Robinson's case makes "To Kill a Mockingbird a compelling look into racism of the 1930s" and "the day-to-day prejudice seen within the town mirrors what African Americans have faced on a daily basis every day before and since its publication."
- In Mary McDonagh Murphy's collection of essays titled Scout, Atticus Boo, Andrew Young gives his experience reading the novel as a black leader during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
- Young stated that Atticus Finch "represents a generation of intelligent white lawyers who eventually, in the fifties and sixties, became federal judges who changed the South."
- Judges like Minor Wisdom, Griffin Bell, and Brian Simpson protected the rights of black men to march and protest. Young said, "They were Atticus Finch. They were the fine, upstanding men of wisdom and courage that really - without them we would not have had a civil rights movement."
- Young continued that "To Kill a Mockingbird gave us hope that justice could prevail and that white people of principle ... were willing to stand up and challenge the system in any way."
- "The novel's purpose is to prompt white Americans to reflect upon their own actions and work towards change ... as it repeatedly warns against the dangers of white prejudice against the black community."
- Interview with a student.How has your view of prejudice and injustice changed since reading To Kill a Mockingbird?Whose voice does the novel represent?
- With Scout being the narrator of the story, and her father Atticus teaching her moral lessons, the voice of the novel is that of white Americans.
- A quote from Dara Lusk's article To Kill a Mockingbird: America's 60-year-old wake up call.
- "Seventeen bullet holes in him. They didn't have to shoot him that much."
- That wakeup call happened in the summer of 2020 when white Americans joined the Black Lives Matter movement.
- This quote about the murder of Tom Robinson by the prison guards produced no uproar from the Maycomb community.
- White Americans spoke up and joined the protests in 2020 asking for justice after the unnecessary shootings by police that killed Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, and Philando Castile.
- "Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we start is no reason for us not to try."
- Did the moral courage of the Finches spark the latest generation of To Kill a Mockingbird readers to stand up against prejudice and injustice?
- Andrew Young thinks so. He said, "To Kill a Mockingbird was an act of protest" and that "young people need to look back and realize how far we've come."
- Atticus seemed to know that progress towards ending prejudice and injustice would take time when he said: (above quote)The journey to equality has been long and difficult and is far from over, but the American voice has finally spoken to say that change is needed.
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