The racial concerns that Harper Lee addresses in To Kill a Mockingbird began long before her story starts and continued long after. In order to sift through the many layers of prejudice that Lee exposes in her novel, the reader needs to understand the complex history of race relations in the South.
Many states — particularly in the South — passed “Jim Crow” laws (named after a black, minstrel show character), which severely limited how African Americans could participate in society. The U. S. Supreme Court paved the ways for these laws in 1883 when the court ruled that it couldn’t enforce the 14th Amendment at the individual level. The first Jim Crow law appeared in 1890; the laws increased from there and lasted until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.
Many whites at the time believed that instead of progressing as a race, blacks were regressing with the abolition of slavery. Southern churches frequently upheld this racist thinking, which also helped give the Jim Crow laws some of their power.
