Post by Steve Gibbs on Apr 9, 2006 13:13:31 GMT -5
As you read further, you will discover that while the children are playing, the adults get embroiled in a racial complexity. This racial event was inspired by a true story.
Read this brief biography of author Harper Lee. Then visit the link and read the brief summary about the factual incident - Case of the Scottsboro Boys - that inspired some of the actions that unfold in the story.
The assignment: see if you can find another website about the Scottsboro Boys Trial, or a photo, or some piece of information of illustration. Provide a link to it. Share your thoughts.
Nelle Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, to Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch Lee. Harper Lee grew up in the small southwestern Alabama town of Monroeville. Her father, a former newspaper editor and proprietor, was a lawyer who also served on the state legislature (1926-38). As a child, Lee was a tomboy and a precocious reader and enjoyed the friendship of her schoolmate and neighbor, the young Truman Capote, who provided the basis of the character of Dill in her novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.
Lee was only five years old in when the first trials began in April 1931 in the small Alabama town of Scottsboro surrounding the purported rapes of two white women by nine young black men. The defendants, who were nearly lynched before being brought to court, were not provided with the services of a lawyer until the first day of trial. Despite medical testimony that the women had not been raped, the all-white jury found the men guilty of the crime and sentenced all but the youngest, a twelve-year-old, to death. Six years of subsequent trials saw most of these convictions repealed and all but one of the men freed or paroled. The Scottsboro case left a deep impression on the young Lee, who would use it later as the rough basis for the events in To Kill a Mockingbird.
www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/scottsboro.html
Read this brief biography of author Harper Lee. Then visit the link and read the brief summary about the factual incident - Case of the Scottsboro Boys - that inspired some of the actions that unfold in the story.
The assignment: see if you can find another website about the Scottsboro Boys Trial, or a photo, or some piece of information of illustration. Provide a link to it. Share your thoughts.
Background info on Harper Lee
Nelle Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, to Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Cunningham Finch Lee. Harper Lee grew up in the small southwestern Alabama town of Monroeville. Her father, a former newspaper editor and proprietor, was a lawyer who also served on the state legislature (1926-38). As a child, Lee was a tomboy and a precocious reader and enjoyed the friendship of her schoolmate and neighbor, the young Truman Capote, who provided the basis of the character of Dill in her novel, To Kill a Mockingbird.
Lee was only five years old in when the first trials began in April 1931 in the small Alabama town of Scottsboro surrounding the purported rapes of two white women by nine young black men. The defendants, who were nearly lynched before being brought to court, were not provided with the services of a lawyer until the first day of trial. Despite medical testimony that the women had not been raped, the all-white jury found the men guilty of the crime and sentenced all but the youngest, a twelve-year-old, to death. Six years of subsequent trials saw most of these convictions repealed and all but one of the men freed or paroled. The Scottsboro case left a deep impression on the young Lee, who would use it later as the rough basis for the events in To Kill a Mockingbird.
www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/scottsboro.html
