Brown vs Board

1950's the time of struggles. There was a famous case going on called the Brown vs Board of Education, and it was about the white and black schools in America. The black schools were inferior to the white schools because they were not getting the funding from the schools. There was a third grade girl named Linda Brown, who was African American. She had to walk one mile to get to her school, when there was a school 7 blocks away, but it was a white school. Her father, Oliver Brown had decided to enroll her into the white school, but the principal had rejected her from the school. He then went to the NAACP, and they had taken the case to trial. With the case going to the supreme court, on October 1, 1951, and was part of some other trials that were going against the school segregation. The case was actually heard on December 9, 1952, but was failed to reach a decision. When there was another trial from December 7-8 1953, they had come up with a verdict in the end. The judges had made the decision that the schools were going to be no longer segregated. This did not change everything though. The court case was just about the schools, they had not changed the segregation in restaurants, restrooms and water fountains. Also they did not set a time date in which the public schools had to change by. But this was a huge step to Civil Rights Movement.

http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhistory/early-civilrights/brown.html

The Controller of Life (Gossip)

The art of gossip can be very hurtful and untruthful. When someone decides to start gossiping rumors start and things start to get skewed from person to person. This is seen during the clip from Doubt when the priest is talking. He tells a lady to go home after she has gossiped about someone in her community and to go on her roof, to cut up a pillow and she does. When she goes back to the priest after she had cut up the pillow, he asks her what happened when she cut up the pillow, and she says feathers. He then tells her to go and collect all the feathers that have fallen from the pillow that went with the wind. She says that is not possible and that she does not know where all the feathers went. He then tells her thats gossip, and its very true. When you tell someone something, you have no clue who they are going to go and tell, and you don't know how they will view the story and how they will explain the story. In To Kill A Mocking Bird, the art of gossip affects Boo Radley a lot. When Scout hears stories about him, she hears all about how he has stabbed his parents and how he eats his cats. She has no proof of these things, but being a young child she believes everything she hears and she talks about everything she hears. With the problems of gossip in the town, people get a wrong view of other people and they start to make assumptions. Scout and her brother Jem, act very immature at times when they imitate the Radley family, over the summer. They base all the gossip they hear around the skits and this puts thoughts into their heads before they can even really know anything about Boo. This is similar to the clip from Doubt, when the priest tells the lady to go to her roof and cut up the pillow. All the feathers are the adults and children in the community and how they hear one thing and they spread that idea around and put their own thoughts about it on the story. With no one knowing anything about Boo exactly they all think he is some big mean guy, who easily could be a very nice man, who just has very strict parents. Gossip is a simple part of life though, and everyone goes through it. With Scout being a young child, she is first experiencing gossip, and it his taking a huge part of her. She is oblivious to the things that she is doing and saying about other people, and she doesn't understand the control of one's words. Also she makes assumptions about everything she hears and skews that into her on way and then she makes judgements from the things she hears, which somethings she is not supposed to hear at all. Another thing that causes a problem with her being so young, is she does not have a huge vocabulary. So when someone says something, she may not understand what they are saying but she still repeats those things and she also takes offense to them sometimes.

The Amazing Woman of the South

Born on April 28, 1926 in Alabama and she was the youngest of four children and she grew up being a tomboy. When she was growing up her father was not around that much because he was a lawyer and a member of the Alabama state legislature. Also her mom had a mental illness and she was thought to be bipolar, which made Lee’s childhood very hard. When she was in high school she started to get interested in english and after leaving high school she went to Huntingdon College in Montgomery. She had ended up transferring to the University of Alabama, and she was known an being a loner and being very to herself. When she was a junior she entered the law school at Alabama, but she had started to see that she really wanted to be a writer. In 1956, friends of hers told her that they would support her for a year, so she could dedicate her time to writing, and she got an agent. She then wrote her one and only book To Kill a Mockingbird. A couple years later, they had made a movie from the book To Kill a Mockingbird, and she had supported the film completely. She ended winning a Pulitzer Prize winner from her book To Kill A Mocking Bird and attempted to start other novels/books but she never published any more books.

References

http://www.biography.com/articles/Harper-Lee-9377021

http://www.teenreads.com/authors/au-lee-harper.asp

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/mocking/