Mockingbird

Interesting Events

     For years Nelle juggled a series of unrewarding jobs in New York. Bookstore clerk and then ticket agent for two different airline company, writing at night and on weekends. By November 1956 she had completed a handful of stories that satisfied her. "The Land of Sweet Forever", "A Roomful of Kibble", "Snow on the Mountain" and "The Viewer and the Viewed".

     Actually, Brown had steered her to the wrong person, but he was not too far off. Williams handled film and dramatic rights for books, plays and musicals- this was why Brown knew of her. He had shown her the outline of a musical he was working on called Jack O'Diamonds. The person Nelle needed to see was Maurice Crain, Williams' husband, the representative of literary properties.

     Readers, teachers and scholars alike tend to assume that in writing To Kill a Mockingbird, Nelle was choosing to tell a version of the Scottsboro Boys trials in 1931-1937. The Scottsboro "boys' were accused of raping two white girls in boxcars on the Southern Railroad freight run from Chattanooga to Memphis, as the train crossed the Alabama border on march 25, 1931. The public was fascinated by the store because of its sheer ugliness. During the boys' first trial, in Scottsboro, Alabama, their legal counsel was an alcoholic real estate attorney and his doddering assistant.

     During the boys' second trial, they were hoping to expose the inequities of the U.S. justice system, the Communists appointed attorneys Samuel Liebowitz and Joseph Brodsky. Four of the boys were released after all charges against them were dropped. Eventually, all the Scottsboro boys were freed except for one, who attempted to rape and kill the two white girls in boxcars. He was arrested by the Michigan authorities and sentenced to 20 years in jail.

How Qi Ming
4 Cergas
28th of March 2014