To Kill A Mockingbird Should Be Banned Essay

Superior Essays
The book I chose for banned book week is To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. This book was published on July 11th, 1960. Harper Lee claims that this book is not autobiographical, but says there are many similarities between the story and her life. Her father was a lawyer as was Scout, who is the main character of the story. Harper said she was also a tomboy growing up similar to how Scout acts in the novel. Also, the racism and segregation represented in the novel is similar to what Harper saw growing up in her small town of Monroeville Alabama.
The book takes place in Maycomb Alabama between 1933 and 1935. The main characters are Scout Finch, who starts off at 6 years old, her father Atticus, her brother Jem and the cook Calpurnia. Scout
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The aspects being challenged deal with the profanity, racial references, and conflict being based around rape. The book is still banned in many classrooms and school libraries. There is an extensive list of reasons why people wanted this book to be banned. The majority of the complaints come from school districts across the nation of all grade levels. However, there does seem to be more school districts in the Southern states that banned this book than the Northern states. Some of the complaints include the words “damn” and whore lady,” as being inappropriate. Also there was discussion that Racism was being “guised” into the story. Many black organizations said this books level of racism was inappropriate, degraded African Americans, and goes against the values of most communities. There are many school districts that wanted this book banned ranging from 1966 through present day. There is still no clear decision on if this book has a beneficial purpose worth reading in the school classroom and is banned …show more content…
I read this book during my Freshman year of high school and did not see anything that struck me as needing to be censored. While researching this book I learned how there was a large group of school districts that excluded this book from their school libraries and removed them from classroom reading criteria. I selected this passage because I am interested in the law field and this fit well in how people thought during that time period. The idea of black men not having a fair trial compared to white men is saddening, but a real truth of the past. I began questioning the rules of censorship because of the fact that many of the themes stated in this story were true. It was not as if they were making up how racism was a problem and that people were not treated equally in the eyes of the law. Producing the video definitely felt strange. However, reading aloud and then watching myself on my laptop deepened the meaning of what I was saying. Another lesson taken away from this assignment was the fact that there are no women’s rights organizations asking for the banishment of this book. Women were treated poorly in this book, which was also a fact of the past, and there seems to be no issue. It is interesting how racism is the main focus point of this novel, but in my opinion women are just as unequal as African Americans in this book. The points that connect from the article are exactly what is

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