Jim Crow Laws, the Great Depression, and the Scottsboro Boys English 9 Southern Gothic Literature Setting & Historical Context for both novels:

To Kill a Mockingbird is set in southern Alabama in the early 1930s.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is set in a small Georgia mill town in the late 1930s.

The South was heavily segregated at the time, in what is known as Jim Crow Laws. Jim Crow Laws: 1890s to 1960s

In legal theory, black people received "separate but equal" treatment — in actuality, public facilities for blacks were nearly always inferior to those for whites, when they existed at all. In addition, blacks were systematically denied the right to vote in most of the rural South through the selective application of literacy tests and other racially motivated criteria. The following Jim Crow etiquette norms show how pervasive these racist ideas were:

1. A black male could not offer his hand (to shake hands) with a white male because it implied being socially equal. Obviously, a black male could not offer his hand or any other part of his body to a white woman, because he risked being accused of rape. 2. Black people and white people were not supposed to eat together. If they did eat together, white people were to be served first, and some sort of partition was to be placed between them. 3. Under no circumstance was a black male to offer to light the cigarette of a white female -- that gesture implied intimacy. 4. White people did not use courtesy titles of respect when referring to black people, for example, Mr., Mrs., Miss., Sir, or Ma'am. Instead, black people were called by their first names. Black people had to use courtesy titles when referring to white people, and were not allowed to call them by their first names. 5. If a black person rode in a car driven by a white person, the black person sat in the back seat, or the back of a truck. 6. White motorists had the right-of-way at all intersections. Separate…but equal? End of Jim Crow

• 1954 court case: Brown v. Board of Education

The Supreme Court of the U.S. declared segregation of public schools is unconstitutional.

• Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 overruled remaining Jim Crow laws, but it has taken years of court challenges to unravel all the institutional discrimination. Add to that: The Great Depression in the 1930s

Dorothea Lange was a photo-journalist who captured the images of the Great Depression. Her photographs of migrant workers were often presented with captions featuring the words of the workers themselves. Lange’s first exhibition, held in 1934, established her reputation as a skilled documentary photographer. In 1940, she received the Guggenheim Fellowship. Rural South= hardest hit

The rural South suffered from low wages and low crop prices long before the 1930s. If Southerners were lucky enough to have a job, they worked as sharecroppers, tenant farmers, or factory workers, never making enough money to save, but enough to pay for their home and food for their families. Others, who were less fortunate, were forced to beg, train-hop, or look for monthly or daily work, making very little money and rarely having enough to feed their families or pay their debt. The Scottsboro Boys The Alabama National Guard protects the accused Scottsboro Boys 3-20-1931 The Scottsboro Boys

The Scottsboro Boys were nine black defendants in a 1931 rape case initiated in Scottsboro, Alabama. The case was heard by the United States Supreme Court twice and the decisions established the principles that:

1. criminal defendants are entitled to effective assistance of counsel 2. that people may not be de facto excluded from juries because of their race.

(de facto means in effect; de facto segregation isn't segregation by law, but is segregation that can be just as real and deeply-rooted as if it were law.) Sources http://ww2.valdosta.edu/~sljennin/US_map-Deep_South.png https://i.ytimg.com/vi/kNFmL8GvqsA/hqdefault.jpg http://www.neabigread.org/books/lonelyhunter/readers-guide/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/freedomriders/issues/jim-crow-laws http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/what.htm http://www.biography.com/people/dorothea-lange-9372993 https://historymatters.appstate.edu/sites/historymatters.appstate.edu/files/rememberingthegreatdepressionreivew_000.pdf https://photos.smugmug.com/Photo-History-1/The-Snapshot-Century/i-TTVRznX/0/M/Sharecropper%20Shack-M.jpg http://www.ethicsed.org/programs/lawsoflife/pdf/tkamworksheets.pdf http://www.stageandcinema.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/The-Alabama-National-Guard-protects-the-accused-Scottsboro-Boys-Ma rch-20-1931..jpg?width=650 Kirrin Coleman, BHS