07+Activity+Essay+and+Quotations

Activity: Suggested Essay Topics
Discuss Harper Lee’s portrayal of the black community and the characters of Calpurnia and Tom Robinson. Are they realistic or idealized? The black community in Maycomb is quite idealized, especially in the scenes at the black church and in the “colored balcony” during the trial. Lee’s portrayal of the black community isn’t unrealistic or unbelievable; it is important to point out, however, that she emphasizes all of the good qualities of the community without ever pointing out any of the bad ones. The black community is shown to be loving, affectionate, welcoming, pious, honest, hardworking, close-knit, and forthright. Calpurnia and Tom, members of this community, possess remarkable dignity and moral courage. But the idealization of the black community serves an important purpose in the novel, heightening the contrast between victims and victimizers. The town’s black citizens are the novel’s victims, oppressed by white prejudice and forced to live in an environment where the mere word of a man like Bob Ewell can doom them to life in prison, or even execution, with no other evidence. By presenting the blacks of Maycomb as virtuous victims—good people made to suffer—Lee makes her moral condemnation of prejudice direct, emphatic, and explicit. [|Close] Discuss the way Harper Lee explores childhood in the novel //To Kill a Mockingbird//

During the story, Jem and Scout undergo a transition from innocence to experience. What were the key stages of this transition and how did they affect Jem and Scout?

What is Atticus’s role and status in the community?

Discuss the role of family in //To Kill a Mockingbird.// Look at more than just the Finch family//.//

“Neighbours bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbour. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbours give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad.” What did the children give Boo Radley? Justice is only available to those who can afford it. Is this true in //To Kill a Mockingbird?//

“The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience”. Which characters in //To Kill a Mockingbird// can demonstrate they have a conscience?

Why does Harper Lee use the mocking bird symbol and what are the important messages in the text for our society?

Based on: SparkNotes Editors. (2002). SparkNote on To Kill a Mockingbird. Retrieved August 10, 2010, from [] ** Quotations to support essay writing. In order to complete the essay correctly you will need to have memorised part or all of the following 30 quotations. (Very long quotations should be reduced to a significant few words). It will be essential for at least five accurate quotations to be embedded in the essay. **   Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum. **Scout (Jean Louise Finch) the narrator, Chapter 1**. Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing. **Scout, Chapter 2.** You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view--until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it. **Atticus Finch to daughter Scout, Chapter** 3. //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. I don't know of any landowner around here who begrudges those children any game their father can hit. Of course he shouldn't, but he'll never change his ways. Are you going to take out your disapproval on his children?// You are too young to understand it ... but sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hand of--oh, of your father. **Miss Maudie Atkinson to Scout, Chapter 5.** There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results. **Miss Maudie Atkinson, Chapter 5.** The sixth grade seemed to please him from the beginning: he went through a brief Egyptian Period that baffled me - he tried to walk flat a great deal, sticking one arm in front of him and one in back of him, putting one foot behind the other. He declared Egyptians walked that way; I said if they did I didn't see how they got anything done, but Jem said they accomplished more than the Americans ever did, they invented toilet paper and perpetual embalming, and asked where would we be today if they hadn't? Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts. **Scout, Chapter 7.** When a child asks you something, answer him, for goodness' sake. But don't make a production of it. Children are children, but they can spot an evasion quicker than adults, and evasion simply muddles 'em. **Atticus Finch, Chapter 9.** I was born good but had grown progressively worse every year. **Scout, Chapter 9.** Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don't pretend to understand. **Atticus Finch, Chapter 9**. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird. **Atticus Finch to daughter Scout, Chapter 10.** Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird. **Miss Maudie Atkinson to Scout, Chapter 10**. It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived. **Scout, Chapter 11.** The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience. **Atticus Finch, Chapter 11.** I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do. **Atticus Finch, Chapter 11**. //Folks don’t like to have somebody around knowin’ more than they do. It aggravates ‘em. You’re not gonna change any of them by talkin’ right, they’ve got to want to learn themselves, and when they don’t want to learn there’s nothing you can do but keep your mouth shut or talk their language.//
 * //Atticus Finch Chapter 3//**
 * //Calpurnia Chapter. 12//**

She seemed glad to see me when I appeared in the kitchen, and by watching her I began to think there was some skill involved in being a girl. **Scout, Chapter 12**. So it took an eight-year-old child to bring 'em to their senses.... That proves something - that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human. Hmp, maybe we need a police force of children. **Atticus Finch, Chapter 16.** The witnesses for the state have presented themselves to you gentlemen, to this court, in the cynical confidence that their testimony would not be doubted, confident that you gentlemen would go along with them on the assumption - the evil assumption - that all Negroes lie, that all Negroes are basically immoral beings, that all Negro men are not to be trusted around our women, an assumption one associates with minds of their caliber. Which, gentlemen, we know is in itself a lie as black as Tom Robinson's skin, a lie I do not have to point out to you. You know the truth, the truth is this: some Negroes lie, some Negroes are immoral, some Negro men cannot be trusted around women, black or white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men. **Speech to the jury by Atticus Finch, Chapter 20.** I'm no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and in the jury system - that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality. Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up. **Speech to the jury by Atticus Finch, Chapter 20**. //But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal- there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court. It can be the Supreme Court of the United States or the humblest J.P. court in the land, or this honourable court which you serve. Our courts have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levellers, and in our courts all men are created equal.// "I think I'll be a clown when I get grown," said Dill. "Yes, sir, a clown.... There ain't one thing in this world I can do about folks except laugh, so I'm gonna join the circus and laugh my head off." "You got it backwards, Dill," said Jem. "Clowns are sad, it's folks that laugh at them." "Well, I'm gonna be a new kind of clown. I'm gonna stand in the middle of the ring and laugh at the folks." **Dill and Jem Chapter 22**. I don't know [how they could convict Tom Robinson], but they did it. They've done it before and they did it tonight and they'll do it again and when they do it-seems that only children weep. **Atticus Finch to son Jem Finch, Chapter 22**. I think there's just one kind of folks. Folks. **Scout, Chapter 23**. The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box. As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it - whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash. **Atticus Finch to his son Jem Finch, Chapter 23.** If there's just one kind of folks, why can't they get along with each other? If they're all alike, why do they go out of their way to despise each other? Scout, I think I'm beginning to understand something. I think I'm beginning to understand why Boo Radley's stayed shut up in the house all this time. It's because he wants to stay inside. **Jem Finch, Chapter 23.** //In the secret courts of men's hearts Atticus had no case. Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed.// I'm not a very good man, sir, but I am sheriff of Maycomb County. Lived in this town all my life an' I'm goin' on forty-three years old. Know everything that's happened here since before I was born. There's a black boy dead for no reason, and the man responsible for it's dead. Let the dead bury the dead this time, Mr. Finch. Let the dead bury the dead. **Sheriff Tate, Chapter 30.** Neighbours bring food with death and flowers with sickness and little things in between. Boo was our neighbour. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbours give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad. **Scout, Chapter 31**. //Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.//
 * //Atticus Finch Chapter. 20//**
 * Harper Lee ch. 25**
 * //Scout, Chapter. 31//**