SOURCE: Chura, Patrick. “Prolepsis and Anachronism: Emmet Till and the Historicity of To Kill a Mockingbird.” Southern Literary Journal 32, no. 2 (spring 2000): 1-26.

In the following essay, Chura discusses the representation of race and justice in To Kill a Mockingbird in the historical context of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s.

Though there is a strong consensus that To Kill a Mockingbird is deeply oriented within the history of the Depression era, no analysis has attempted to separate the historical conditions of the moment of the text's production in the mid 1950s from the historical present of the novel, the mid 1930s. Such analysis is revealing, first because under scrutiny the novel's 1930s history is exposed as at times quite flawed in its presentation of facts. The WPA, for example, did not exist until 1935, but it is mentioned in the novel's fourth chapter, which is set in 1933. Eleanor...