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For the high-schoolers reading To Kill a Mockingbird today, America is a very different place than it was when Lee wrote her novel 50 years ago. Lee's story of Scout Finch and her father, Atticus - a small-town Southern lawyer who defends a black man unjustly accused of rape - came out just as the nation was fighting over school desegregation. To Kill a Mockingbird didn't change everyone's mind, but it did open some. And it made an impression on many young people who, like Scout, were trying to get a grip on right and wrong in a world that is not always fair.

"At its foundation, To Kill A Mockingbird is not the most morally complex of works, it is true. But then again, it is a novel written for children, and when it was composed, in the late 1950s, and published, in July, 1960, the proposition that black people ought to be treated as equal citizens was still a radical one in America. If Lee makes it clear to her audience where she believes our sympathies ought to lie - with Tom Robinson, the man falsely accused of rape, whose conviction is assured by a racist judicial system, and with Mayella Ewell, the impoverished incest victim who is forced to falsely accuse him by her abusive alcoholic father - then it is perhaps because at the dawn of the 1960s, the civil rights movement had yet to realize many of its most important victories, and the second-wave women's movement was barely even beginning."

Six project options to serve as final assessment for novel study. Focuses especially on Civil Rights Movement, prejudice, and legal system.

ADICHIE review of TKAM

To Kill a Mockingbird meets the 21st Century

Excellent idea for next year's 50 yr anniversary