After the Revolutionary war was over, the 13^th Amendment was passed which outlawed slavery. However, it wouldn't be until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that there would begin to be another noticeable change in the way black men, women and children were treated. To Kill A Mockingbird is set in Alabama during the early 1930s, so this lesson is about some of the historical background from the Civil War time up to the 1930s with regard to life in the south.

To Kill A Mockingbird is a story told through the eyes of a young girl growing up in a small town in Alabama. Her father is a lawyer and is asked to defend a black man accused of raping a white woman, a heinous crime in the south—not because a woman was attacked, but because a black man did it. For a black man to even touch a white woman in the south was an unwritten crime that could be punishable by lynching, so carrying the act to an unspeakable level was far worse.

The information in the following lessons lead up to the introduction of To Kill A Mockingbird is nonfiction, but the novel itself is fictional. There are allusions to actual events in history at this time, but the characters and story are fictional.

The Civil War is considered one of the most tragic wars because the war was a people fighting its own. It pitted state against state, family against family and in some cases, brother against brother. The south was unhappy about the direction the country was going in regards to slavery. There was already a law in place that didn't allow the importation of slaves, now the government was going a step further to stop the expansion of slave states beyond what existed. This further infringed on the life style and livelihood of the southern plantations that relied on slaves for harvesting the cotton crop. As a result of this and other differences of opinion, the south decided to succeed from the union and form their own country. The South felt the direction the United States was going in would change their way of life and deprive them of their freedom to live as they had become accustomed. The federal government and the northern states in the 1800s believed this to be a form of rebellion and a threat against the safety of the United States and, so, the Civil War ensued. The north mostly fighting to keep the country together and the south to separate from the north and keep their lifestyle as it was.

After the loss of more American lives than have ever been lost in any war since, the Civil War ended in 1865. The 13^th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery all together—for any state in America. The 14^th Amendment provided blacks with equality, and the 15^th Amendment gave the black man the right to vote. An era of reconstruction followed the war, but it would be a 100 years before black men and women would actually begin to see the equality they were promised in the Constitution of the United States.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amendments_to_the_United_States_Constitution

The reconstruction that followed the Civil War was chaotic for everyone, especially the southern states. Many former slaves left the south to go to the north, but not as many as you would think because their home was the south and many preferred to stay where they were. It is where their family and friends were. Many got jobs doing the same work they were doing for such little money that their lifestyle was not much different than it had been before the war. Still, it was progress in the right direction and blacks took a more active role as citizens of the United States, however incremental.

Approximately 15 years after the Civil War, a black woman named Ida B. Wells became the leader of an anti-lynching crusade. The reality of blacks having equal rights was far from true even in the 1890s. The lynching of black people was a common practice among the southern states and she was trying to put a stop to it.

In 1896, a landmark case went before the Supreme Court that decided that black people were still considered equal according to the 14^th Amendment if they had separate but equal facilities. This case was called Plessy vs. Ferguson. It was a step back from the Civil Rights Act of 1875 that banned discrimination on the basis of race, creed or color for public accommodations. Under the ruling, blacks were supposed to have equal facilities, but in reality this was not the case. Some or all segregation of public facilities continued well into the 1960s. This meant that black people couldn't use the same public bathrooms, water fountains, restaurants, or schools that white people did. Transportation vehicles were sometimes separate, but if a black person was allowed to board a white bus they had to sit at the back or stand and give their seat up for a white person.

Mark Twain, a popular American realism author, refers to the lynching of black people as Moral Cowardice and the inability of weak people to stand up for what is right against peer pressure. This is what he had to say:

In 1900 there were eight more cases than in 1899, and probably this year there will be more than there were last year. The year is little more than half gone, and yet there are eighty-eight cases as compared with one hundred and fifteen for all of last year. The four Southern states, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi are the worst offenders. Last year there were eight cases in Alabama, sixteen in Georgia, twenty in Louisiana, and twenty in Mississippi--over one-half the total. This year to date there have been nine in Alabama, twelve in Georgia, eleven in Louisiana, and thirteen in Mississippi--again more than one-half the total number in the whole United States.--Chicago Tribune.

It must be that the increase comes of the inborn human instinct to imitate--that and man's commonest weakness, his aversion to being unpleasantly conspicuous, pointed at, shunned, as being on the unpopular side. Its other name is Moral Cowardice, and is the commanding feature of the make-up of 9,999 men in the 10,000. Lynching's and inequality between black and white continued to be a problem in the south for many years to come.

In 1920 women were given the right to vote and, then, in 1929 The Great Depression hit, which put the United States into a deep economic slump that especially affected the south. The Great Depression was the financial collapse of the economy of the United States. There were not enough jobs for men to support their families, so it was during this time that men and some woman took to hitching rides on railroad cars to other places in the hope of finding work to support themselves and/or their families. It is in this same period of time that the Scottsboro Trials take place. Five black men are accused of raping two white women while traveling on railroad cars.