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Jim Crow Laws In To Kill A Mockingbird

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The Great Depression was a period in the 1930’s where poverty had reached an all time high after the stock market crash in 1929 (McCabe). The novel To Kill a Mockingbird takes place during this time, and faces many challenges related to The Great Depression. Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, used inspiration from these real-life historical events to hook into her novel. Some of these significant historical events include the Jim Crow laws, mob mentality, and the Scottsboro trials in conjunction with racism. One of the first known influence on Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird are the Jim Crow laws. The Jim Crow laws were a collection of unrelenting anti-black laws (Pilgrim). These laws weren’t just simply a set list of rules, …show more content…
One reason some people believed that the laws were necessary, is that almost everyone in every field believed that Blacks were socially, intellectually, and culturally inferior to the Whites (Pilgrim). Whites were also worried that by treating Blacks as equals they were risking a creation of a mutt race which would bring the fall of America (Pilgrim). If a person of color was to break any of these laws, they were to be cruelly punished (Pilgrim). A specific form of punishment appeared to be very popular around this time, and that would be the act of lynching. Between the years of 1882 and 1968, there were 4,730 known lynchings and out of these, 3,440 of them were people of African American ethnicity (Pilgrim). That is roughly three out of every four lynchings. Examples of these Jim Crow laws appear many times over …show more content…
The study of mob mentality can also be used to evaluate situations that range from issues during evacuations to when public gatherings turn violent (Smith). When a mob is created, it is because a mass of people have assembled for the reason that they are angry about a subject (Edmonds). In this case, it will only take one act of violence to whip the crowd into an uproar (Edmonds). People may feel the need to join a mob for many reasons, one of them being the subconscious “herd mentality” (Smith). Certain behaviors that appear in situations like a mob may include destroying property, hurting other people, and other illegal activities the person would not otherwise do unless in this circumstance (Edmonds). Mob mentality can also be seen on Black Friday, as several shoppers push and shove each other out of the way to make it to the sale items. (Smith). There are many other examples of mob mentality over the course of To Kill a Mockingbird, such as the specific moment when in chapter 15, where the mob shows up at the county jail, demanding Atticus to give them Tom, supposedly wanting to lynch him (Lee 194). This scene goes further into depth with mob mentality when.............. Mob mentality is a subconscious animal instinct that humans are unable to control, as well as the mindset that is created when there is a large amount of

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