Poor Southerners In To Kill A Mockingbird

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Poverty affected many Americans in the 1930s, and the Great Depression further widened the gap between the wealthy and the poor. In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, the representation of poor white Southerners accurately relates to the lives of actual Southerners living in poverty during the 1930s. In To Kill a Mockingbird, the Cunningham family remain prideful despite their social and economic status, and remain humble by not accepting anything they cannot repay. However, the Ewell family represents the other type of white Southerners, the type that will do anything to survive. The relationship between wealthy Southerners and poor Southerners was non-existent for the most part, except for when the poor could provide goods or a service inexpensively. …show more content…
Vernon Johnson states in a memoir, “The poor people we knew were very much like us. They were devout church-goers devoted family members. Most were intelligent and believed in working hard, living upright lives, and keeping meticulously clean (Johnson 160).” Poor Southerners often held the same standards for themselves as wealthy families did; although, society did not respect them as so. Working hard and staying upright was a common theme among families living in poverty. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout says, “The Cunninghams never took anything they can’t pay back–no church baskets and no scrimp stamps (Lee 20).” The Cunningham family, much like that of actual poor Southerners, was hard-working and diligent, even though they did not have a high education. The main defining line between rich and poor was the level of education and finance. Poverty was widespread due to the Great Depression, and most understood that and continued to work hard; however, others …show more content…
Crime due to poverty was not as common in the 1930s as it is in the present; although, for some families, crime was the only solution to feeding one’s children. Lee describes the Ewells as the lowest of the low, “Atticus said the Ewells had been the disgrace of Maycomb for three generations. None of them had done an honest day’s work in his recollection… and it’s certainly bad, but when a man spends his relief checks on green whiskey his children have a way of crying from hunger pains (Lee 30).” The Ewells faced a variety of hardships, mostly due to ignorance and apathy, and their struggle for survival consisted of constantly breaking the law. Further in the book, Tom Robinson, an innocent black man is falsely convicted as a rapist due to contrite accusations from the Ewells, and even then they feel no remorse in essentially taking a man’s life away. Even though society considers the Ewells the lowest of the low, the social hierarchy continued to raise their status above black

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