English Essay Describe how Harper Lee portrays the black community in the novel
To kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, is set in the 1930’s but was written in the 1960’s. Although a fictional county, Maycomb is very much like Harper Lee’s hometown Monroeville and most of the experiences Scout has are probably similar to her own. At the time it was set, all white people were thought to be superior to the black community and the black people were treated as scapegoats. ... ” Meaning he would be white with shock because of the incident, he didn’t even look for evidence to see who it was, such as Jem’s trousers, he just assumed straight away that it was someone from the black community. ... The Jim Crow laws were now enforced (segregation) so black and white people weren’t allowed to go to the same school, the same church, share a bus or get married. ... , on the bus, they sat at the front and the black people had to sit at the back and get up for any white person that got on if there was no room or they wanted to sit there. Also, black people used to work as servants for the white people, it was never the other way round, it was unfair pay and they were usually treated badly by their ‘masters’. ... Harper lee has shown this very well in the novel but she has also shown that Atticus treated Calpurnia, his servant, very well. ... Harper Lee portrays the people who are racist as nasty people in general but the non-racist people to be kind a lot of the time. ... The black people where very uneducated. ... Scout could read at a very early age and she is much cleverer than all most the entire black community, just because she is white. There were only a few people in the whole community who could read Including Calpurnia, the Finch’s servant, and her son Zeebo the local dustman. This shows how badly they were treated; Zeebo is probably one of the cleverest black people in the whole community yet he is only the dustman. ... In the 1960’s, the segregation laws were coming to an end, and the black community were standing up for their rights, as you see in the novel, in the 1930’s, they just put up with the white community treating them like dirt. ... As Scout is a young girl, the views are very much a child’s point of view although there are some adult views from Harper Lee herself. I think the reason she may have done this is that at that time when the black people where being treated so unfairly, only children could see that it was wrong, as Atticus says at the time of the trial “it’s seems that only children cry. ... At the beginning of the novel, Jem and Scout are quite ignorant and immature about what is going on just like most children would be. ... Right from the beginning, Harper Lee has tried to make the reader feel sorry for the black people; she has succeeded in doing this.