Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird explores the theme of racial prejudice in America—a theme that ties directly into the emergence of the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement. BLM was in direct response to numerous police killings of unarmed black men and women, which sparked mainly peaceful demonstrations in many communities across the country.
Lee set her story of racial prejudice in the rural Alabama of the 1930s. One of the central episodes of the novel portrays the rape trial brought against the black character Tom Robinson, accused by the 19 year-old Mayella Ewell and her father, Bob Ewell, the sole witness. Rape was a capital crime at that time in Alabama, and though Tom appears to have been framed by the Ewells and exculpated by the lawyering of Atticus Finch, he is convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to the electric chair. He soon after is killed while in custody, shot trying to escape over prison walls.
When Jem asks Atticus "How could they do it, how could they?" his father replies:
"I don't know, but they did it. They've done it before and they did it tonight and they'll do it again and when they do it, seems that only children weep."
For unarmed black Americans gunned down by the police today, the same bitter reality seems to prevail many decades after the fictional period setting of Lee's masterpiece about bigotry and racial injustice.
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