To Kill a Mockingbird was written during the Great depression, a time of soup kitchens and bread lines.
Nine black teenage boys were accused of rape by two white girls. The trials of the boys lasted six years, with convictions, reversals, and numerous retrials. These trials were given the name The Scottsboro Trials, made national headlines, and drastically intensified the debate about race and racism in America.
Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. ... They mandated de jure racial segregation in all public facilities in the states of the former Confederate States of America, starting in 1896 with a "separate but equal" status for African Americans in railroad cars.
The Emmett Till Murder - Civil Rights Case
Emmett Louis Till was a 14-year-old African American boy who was abducted, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in her family's grocery store.
Interactive timeline from the PBS. Click to explore.
In August 1955, a fourteen year old African American boy from Chicago named Emmett Till went to visit relatives near Money, Mississippi. While he had experienced racial discrimination in his hometown of Chicago, he was unaccustomed to the severe segregation he encountered in Mississippi. Soon after talking in "too friendly a manner" with a young white woman in a store, he was kidnapped in the night at gunpoint and brutally murdered by two white men. He was badly beaten before being shot and the corpse was nearly unrecognizable. His mother insisted on an open casket funeral in Chicago and news of Emmett Till's murder shocked America and the world. An all-white jury failed to convict the accused murderers, adding a further sense of injustice. The case is viewed as a turning point in the civil rights movement because of the notoriety it gave to the plight of African Americans in the South.
"One hundred days after Till’s murder, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery city bus and was arrested for violating Alabama's bus segregation laws. Reverend Jesse Jackson told Vanity Fair (1988) that “Rosa said she thought about going to the back of the bus. But then she thought about Emmett Till and she couldn’t do it.”"
In which John Green teaches you MORE about To Kill a Mockingbird. In this installment, John teaches you about race, class, and gender in the American south, as seen through the eyes of Scout and Harper Lee. John will talk about how Scout learns about these aspects of the social order as she interacts with the people of the town, learns from Calpurnia, watches the trial of Tom Robinson, and endures the attack of Bob Ewell. You'll also learn a little bit about Demi Moore and Mila Kunis, and John will ask just who is the Mockingbird, anyway? Not that he'll answer that, but he'll ask it.
How the moral lessons of To Kill a Mockingbird endure today (Maxwell, 2018) - retrieved from The Conversation website.
Little Rock Nine: the day young students shattered racial segregation (Smith, 2017) - retrieved from The Guardian.
The criminal legal system does not deliver justice for First Nations people, says new book (Cunneen, 2022) - A useful article in the Conversation. It's really good and ties to the legal system.
Diamonds: The racism now engulfing Australian netball (Turnbull, 2022).
Lack of proper media coverage in Alice Springs is a 'form of racism': Rita - Sky News opinion.
Researchers help African Australian students tackle racism (African News, 2023).
The Great Depression 
The Scottsboro Case (1931)
A Century of Segregation