Theme Of Mob Mentality In To Kill A Mockingbird

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According to Franklin D. Roosevelt, “If you treat people right, they will treat you right... 90% of the time” (Davis). This is a big part of Harper Lee’s novel To Kill A Mockingbird. The only problem is that many people do not often live up to this saying. If people did, these next historical events and problems would not be a problem. Harper Lee used 3 historical examples to write her novel. She used the Jim Crow laws, the idea of mob mentality, and the Scottsboro Trials. The Jim Crow laws were the first American history influences in Harper Lee’s book To Kill A Mockingbird. The Jim Crow laws were laws that legalized the hate and discrimination against Africans Americans (Pilgrim). The people believed that the Jim Crow laws were necessary because of many wrong reasons. They believed that Blacks were intellectually and culturally inferior to Whites (Pilgrim). Mob mentality is the psychological reason behind how a mob acts or makes bad decisions. Mob mentality has been known to make good people make bad choices like looting or burning a vehicle or on the less extreme side of things smoke a cigarette because their friends are doing it. The main cause of mob mentality is a human’s mind. We have a primal instinct to be part of a group (Smith). Most people want to be like and because of peer pressure we often find ourselves doing actions that we would not normally do (Smith). Mob mentality can be seen in To Kill A Mockingbird many times. It only takes one act of violence to whip the emotionally distressed crowd into a fury (Edmonds). In the book, when Atticus was sitting at the jail with Tom Robinson the mob that came to kill him had never had a previous bad experience with Tom, they just were mad that a man could pull something like this off. Mob mentality is a key historical influence on Harper Lee’s novel, another historical event includes The Scottsboro

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