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.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
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.
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.
Under no circumstance was a black male to offer to light the cigarette of a white female -- that
gesture implied intimacy.
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.
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.
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