64 pages • 2 hours read
Lynda RutledgeMockingbird Summer
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird
Content Warning: This section references rape and racism.
Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird forms a central motif of Lynda Rutledge’s book and is alluded to in its title. Rutledge demonstrates the importance of the novel for the story’s historical framework as an influential book of the 1960s and borrows from its plot and thematic elements. To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960 at the height of the civil rights movement. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and garnered immediate popularity. It remains widely read in schools and considered a classic in modern American Literature. In 1962, just two years after its publication, To Kill a Mockingbird was adapted into an acclaimed film, starring Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch. The film further increased the story’s notoriety within American society, and the novel continues to sell millions of copies worldwide. During a transformational period in the history of the United States, Lee grappled with issues of racism, rape, social injustice, racial violence, compassion and humanity.
Like To Kill a Mockingbird, Rutledge’s novel is a bildungsroman that examines the growth of a young protagonist from childhood to adulthood, and both stories unfold through the perspective of children. Lee’s story takes place in a fictional, Depression-era town in Alabama and explores the imbued racism, prejudice, and violence of its white community. Rutledge sets her story in a small town in Texas in which the older generation grew up during the Great Depression. Choosing the 1960s as the setting of the story allows Rutledge to use the historical touchstone of To Kill a Mockingbird’s publication as a motif that thematically connects Lee’s narrative to her own. Rutledge’s narrative describes embedded racism in the Texas town and the ways in which segregation keeps the people divided. Within this historical framework, she explores To Kill a Mockingbird’s reception and influence against the backdrop of the civil rights movement that challenged the racist social standards of the American South. In Lee’s novel, Atticus Finch, the protagonist’s father, upsets the white residents of his Southern community when he decides to defend a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. In Mockingbird Summer, the decision to integrate the all-white softball team also challenges the white community’s entrenched racism and the ways in which the growing civil rights movement challenges racist ideology. Like Lee, whose young protagonist experiences a loss of innocence through an encounter with evil that manifests through racial prejudice, Rutledge crafts a similar character arc for Corky, who bears witness to and reckons with racial injustice in her community through her friendship with America. The young protagonists of both novels have their eyes opened to racialized violence and discrimination against Black people in their lives, which catalyzes greater compassion and empathy in both characters.
Historical Context: The Civil Rights Movement
The civil rights movement in the United States, beginning in the 1950s and culminating in the 1960s (a century after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued), refers to the fight for equal representation under the law for Black Americans in response to the ongoing discrimination, unchecked brutality and racialized violence, and enforcement of Jim Crow laws in the American South that institutionalized racism and segregation. The movement was defined by grassroots organizing, boycotts, protests, and demonstrations, such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 following Rosa Parks’s now-famous refusal to give up her bus seat to a white passenger, the Greensboro sit-ins in 1960, and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. Under the leadership and advocacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the movement gained national momentum and civil rights protests erupted throughout the American South. In 1954, the United States Supreme Court ruled against racial segregation in schools in the landmark decision Brown V. the Board of Education. In an attempt to counter the persistence of discriminatory practices in the American South, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 authorized the prosecution of those attempting to deny any American citizen the right to vote regardless of race.
Highly publicized protests and acts of violence against demonstrators led to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that encouraged students to participate in the movement. In 1963, during the emblematic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech, civil rights leaders and people of all races gathered to demand equal rights for all Americans. In 1964—the year in which Rutledge sets Mockingbird Summer—the United States government passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, banning discrimination based on color, race, religion, sex, and nationality. Despite positive social change, racialized violence and discrimination remained rampant, especially in the South. In 1965, Black activists and allied protesters marched from Selma, Alabama, to the capital building in Montgomery to bring awareness to ongoing segregationist practices, institutionalized obstacles, and white supremist voter suppression tactics that prohibited many Black citizens from exercising their constitutional right to vote. The event later became known as “Bloody Sunday” when law enforcement officers, abetted by local white citizens, assaulted the 600 unarmed protesters crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma and sprayed them with tear gas. That same year, the United States Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 explicitly prohibiting racial discrimination in voting. The assassinations of civil rights leaders like Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. dealt devastating blows to the movement, but the work of civil rights activists continued and, in the late 1960s, other organized social justice movements emerged, such as the anti-war movement protesting US military involvement in Vietnam, the women’s liberation movement, the Black Power Movement, and the American Indian Movement.
