Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird Web quest

Although TKAM is a fiction novel, a trial similar to Tom Robinson’s really occurred in Alabama.

According to Douglas O. Linder, No crime in American history-- let alone a crime that never occurred-- produced as many trials, convictions, reversals, and retrials as did an alleged gang rape of two white girls by nine black teenagers on the Southern Railroad freight run from Chattanooga to Memphis on March 25, 1931. Over the course of the next two decades, the struggle for justice of the "Scottsboro Boys," as the black teens were called, made celebrities out of anonymities, launched and ended careers, wasted lives and produced heroes, opened southern juries to blacks, exacerbated sectional strife, and divided America's political left. The trial is better known as the Scottsboro Boys Trial.

Go to the website below:

www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/FTrials/scottsboro/scottsb.htm

1. Read the intro on the home page and continue on to the complete summary of the trial.

A. What was the most shocking verdict regarding the trial?

B. Write a short reaction to the trial. How does it make you feel? How does the trial relate to TKAM and even The Crucible?

2. Go back to the home page and Click on the Chronology. List the 2 most interesting dates/ events and why you chose them.

3. Click on Railroad Cars

How is the map of the cars even relevant in court?

4. Click on the Biographies link.

A. Read the two women accusers’ biographies. Compare and Contrast these two women in sentence or Venn form.

B. Read at least three of the boys’ who were accused biographies.

What stands out the most to you about each individual?

C. Which person is in the Scottsboro trial is a parallel to Atticus Finch? How are they parallels?

D. Select one other person involved in the trial and read that biography.

Write the name of the person you chose and his/her most significant impact on the trial.

5. Read at least one letter in Letters and Accounts.

What is your impression of the letter writer?

6. Read as much as possible of 1931 Scottsboro Trials (original PDF file) written by a female reporter in 1931 for the ACLU. Why is her account different than the others written at that time or even since then?

7. View as many Images as you can in about 5 minutes. Vary pictures, cartoons and postcards. A picture is worth a thousand words. What do these images show that the text can not?

8. Click “In Their Own Words,” select three quotes that in your own opinion capture the strife and/ or injustice of the trials. Tell who said those quotes and explain what seems to be so particularly significant about that quote.