TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

Harper Lee’s Alabama
Historical Context for To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, her only novel, in the late 1950s after moving to New York City. By the time her book was published in 1960, America, especially the South, was deeply embroiled in racial strife as the struggles of the civil rights movement grew more and more intense.

Parallels are numerous between Lee’s childhood life in Monroeville, Alabama and her fictional town of Maycomb, also in Alabama. Added to the tumultuous history of the era, they provide a rich backdrop for To Kill a Mockingbird.

1926
Nelle Harper Lee is born on April 28 in Monroeville, a small town in southwest Alabama.

1931
Nine young black men are accused of raping two white women in the small town of Scottsboro, Alabama. The defendants are nearly lynched before being brought to court, and are not provided with legal representation until the first day of their trial.  Despite medical testimony that the women have not been raped, the all-white jury finds the men guilty of the crime and sentence all but the youngest, who is 12, to death.

Over the course of the next six years, all but one of the convictions are reversed and five of the men are freed. Harper Lee is just five years old at the time of the trial, but years later she uses the incident as the basis of her novel To Kill a Mockingbird.

1944
After graduating from high school in Monroeville, Lee enrolls at Huntingdon College in Montgomery for one year and then transfers to the University of Alabama where she writes for several student publications.

1947
Lee studies in Oxford, England and then returns to the University of Alabama to study law, but withdraws six months before graduation.

1950
Lee moves to New York City and works as a reservations clerk with Eastern Air Lines and Britain’s BOAC. She writes several essays and short stories, but none are published.

1954
The United States Supreme Court rules in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas that racial segregation in the public schools is illegal.

1954-60
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. serves as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery where he gains national attention for his dedication to the civil rights movement.

1955
While riding on a Montgomery city bus, Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man, triggering a 382-day boycott of the Montgomery bus system.

1955
The Montgomery home of Dr. King, also a leader of the bus boycott, is bombed.

1956
A young black woman named Autherine Lucy is accepted into the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and enrolls as a graduate student in library science. Three days later, after mob violence on campus and in town, she is suspended, reportedly for her safety, and then barred from returning.

1956
Despite legal attempts by NAACP council Thurgood Marshall to have the decision overturned, Lucy is permanently expelled from the University of Alabama. In 1961, Marshall will be the first African American appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

1956
Warrants are issued for the arrest of 115 leaders of the Montgomery bus boycott.
The United States Supreme Court decides in favor of the Montgomery bus boycotters by ruling that segregation of bus passengers is illegal.  Shortly after, African Americans board buses in Montgomery, on a first-come, first-served basis.

1957
While living frugally in a cold-water flat, Lee receives a generous gift from her friends Michael Brown and Joy Williams Brown—a year’s wages with the instructions: “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.” Within the year, she completes her first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird and submits it to J.B. Lippincott Company.

1959
A Kansas farmer Herbert Clutter and his family are murdered. Before the killers are captured, Truman Capote decides to travel to Kansas to investigate and write about the crime. He brings his childhood friend Harper Lee with him as a researcher and to help interview local residents and investigators assigned to the case. Capote’s book, In Cold Blood, is published in 1966.

1960
To Kill a Mockingbird is published on July 11 and becomes an immediate bestseller. The following year it earns a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Today, there are more than 30 million copies in print and it has secured its place in the canon of American literature.

1962
The film of To Kill A Mockingbird is released. Adapted for the screen by Horton Foote (author of the play The Trip to Bountiful), the film receives five Academy Award nominations, including for best picture, and wins three (best actor, best adapted screenplay and best art direction).

1965
March 7: Some 600 civil rights demonstrators in Selma are attacked with clubs and tear gas by state troopers and local sheriff’s deputies. The day will come to be called “Bloody Sunday.”
March 21: About 3,200 marchers set out for Montgomery, the state capitol, to demand equality. Walking 12 miles a day and sleeping in fields, their ranks grow to about 25,000 by the time they reach the capitol.
August 6: President Lyndon Baines Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act into law, terminating the established requirement that would-be voters in the United States must take a literacy test to qualify to register to vote.

1980
The University of Alabama overturns Autherine Lucy’s 1956 expulsion. She receives her Master’s degree in education in 1992, thirty-seven years after having been turned away from the University.

1998
The University of Alabama presents Harper Lee with an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.

1999
To Kill a Mockingbird is voted “Best Novel of the Century” in a poll conducted by the Library Journal.

2005
A signed first-edition of To Kill a Mockingbird sells for $19,000 at Swann Galleries in Manhattan.

2007
At a White House ceremony on November 5, Lee receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, for her outstanding contribution to literature.
Today, the reclusive Lee, now aged 81, divides her time between New York and her hometown of Monroeville.

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