He also attempts to educate the wider community about justice and racial equality. The book's hero of sorts is the righteous white lawyer Atticus Finch, who not only defends an African American against a rape charge, but faces down a lynch mob. US President Donald Trump has weaponized racism and white supremacy, decrying the modern-day civil rights movement banded under Black Lives Matter (BLM) and calling white power marchers in Charlottesville in 2017 "very fine people." In recent weeks, calls for justice have again reached fever pitch.īut like in the Deep South nearly a century ago, little is changing.
Read more: Blacks in the US targeted by an unfair justice systemīlack people continue to suffer from disproportionate levels of police violence, while African Americans are six times more likely to be incarcerated than white people. Set in a fictional Alabama town during the Depression, the story of a false rape accusation against an innocent Black man, Tom Robinson, might not be so out of place today. On the 60th anniversary of the book's publication, To Kill a Mockingbird has perhaps even greater resonance as protests continue to sweep the US and the world following the police killing of an unarmed African American man, George Floyd. It also went on to sell more than 40 million copies. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the following year, was made into an Oscar-winning film in 1962 with Gregory Peck in the lead role, and soon after became the universal text through which school children learnt about civil rights and the struggle for race equality in the US. When Harper Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird on July 11, 1960, its recounting of a struggle for Black justice in the 1930s segregationist South struck a chord amid the rising civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr.
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