Introductory information before reading To Kill a Mockingbird The Great Depression Introductory information before reading To Kill a Mockingbird

The Great Depression The Great Depression began with the stock market crash on October 29, 1929, also known as Black Tuesday. The Depression had devastating effects in the US, and around the world.

Street scene on Black Tuesday

People who had gone to bed with thousands of dollars in the bank woke up to discover that they only had the money in their pockets.

Car for sale in New York

People in the Plains States were particularly hard hit with a severe drought, dust storms, and the Depression. Many came west to find work. So many migrated from Oklahoma, they become known as “Okies.”

The “Okies” were also trying to escape the “Dust Bowl,” a series of dust storms that caused major agricultural damage to the Great Plains from 1930 to 1936. At times, the clouds blackened the sky all the way to California. Millions of acres of farmland became useless, and hundreds of thousands of families were forced to leave their homes.

Families on the road, traveling west.

Leaving South Dakota for Oregon

Okies driving to California

Migrant families camped out

Cooking supper in a shanty, a temporary home

Farmers sometimes allowed migrant workers and families to camp while they were harvesting crops. This often led to “squatter camps” where people began living in thrown-together shacks. Squatter’s shack

18 year old mother at a migrant camp

A school for migrant worker’s kids

Christmas dinner for a migrant family

Breadlines became common, as people struggled to feed themselves and their families

Jobs were scarce as the unemploy-ment levels soared

Migrant workers camp

Dorothea Lange’s photo, “Migrant Mother,” perhaps the most famous image from the Great Depression

To Kill a Mockingbird This novel was written by Harper Lee in 1960. The story takes place during the early 1930s in the small town of Maycomb, Alabama. During the 1930s, the Great Depression was still going on (having started in 1929), and racism was rampant. Racism was particularly strong in the South, which is where the novel takes place.