Throughout history, there has been an overarching theme that writers write about. Great authors write about what they know. They write about what they see. They write what they feel. They write about personal experiences and incorporate details from their lives into their literature. Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is a classic work that reflects the civil and women's rights movement of the 1950s-1960s through its depiction of the relationship between blacks and whites and its portrayal of female characters. The 1950s and 1960s were a time of change and evolution. It led to the birth of the civil rights movement. This was a very influential period in which these new ideas were incorporated into everyday life and became part of American society. “[Harper Lee] was five years old when the Scottsboro Trials, in which nine black men were accused of raping two white women, began in Scottsboro, Alabama” (Mancini, Candice 10). This event is very similar to the Tom Robinson case in To Kill a Mockingbird: Tom Robinson was accused of raping Mayella Ewell, a white woman in town. In 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black man, was murdered by two white men for whistling at a white woman (Mancini, Candice 25). The men who killed them were acquitted by the jury. This shows how a jury was racially biased and would side with the white defendant even if he was clearly guilty. This case is also very similar to the Tom Robinson case where the jury did not want to believe that Tom was actually innocent, despite all the evidence supporting their case. Major aspects of both of these cases were embodied in Lee's novel which demonstrated how she was influenced by the time period in which she wrote. There was still a... middle of the paper... of the era were highlighted in many situations in To Kill a Mockingbird. It is important to recognize that this classic would have taken a different direction if it had been written in a different time when the tide of civil rights and women's rights was not rolling. Works Cited Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. New York: Warner, 2000. Print.Mancini, Candice. Racism in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Detroit: Greenhaven, 2008. Print.Shackelford, Dean. “The Female Voice in To Kill a Mockingbird: Narrative Strategies in Film and Novel.” Mississippi Quarterly 50.1 (Winter 1996): 101-113. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. vol. 194. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Literature Sources from Gale. Network. May 30, 2011. Scudi, Charles. Mockingbird a portrait by Harper Lee. New York: Griffin of St. Martin, 2006. Print.