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How To Kill A Mockingbird Be Kept In School

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I am a current 9th-grade student at York Suburban High School and have recently finished reading To Kill a Mockingbird. I have heard that the school board has been deciding on either removing or keeping the book in the curriculum and I personally believe it should stay. The novel To Kill a Mockingbird written by Harper Lee should be kept in school curriculums because of the valuable life lessons it teaches, and how racism is seen and dealt within the novel. The novel teaches many valuable life lessons throughout it that can be taken and used in life. For example, early on in the book, Walter Cunningham is invited to dinner with the Finches, but he eats his food in an unusual way, so Scout yells at him for it. Calpurnia then brings Scout into …show more content…

After Atticus gave his speech to the all white Jury while defending Tom Robinson, the Jury had to decide whether to acquit Tom or say he’s guilty. Tom Robinson had little chance of being acquitted since he was a black man, and he had supposedly raped a white girl. However, it takes the Jury a few hours to decide, meaning that someone in the jury believed that Tom was innocent and they fought for him to be acquitted(276-282). Someone in the Jury put their and Tom’s race to the side, and he fought to save Tom’s life, since he then saw him as a human, and did not judge him by the color of his skin. A white man had changed his view on race and tried to help a black man, and shows students how people can change and what it means to not stop fighting for equality. During the story, Mr. Link Deas hires Helen after Tom Robinson is killed because she needed support and work with Tom now being gone. However, Helen walks by the Ewell house to work, where the kids and Bob yell and “chunk” at her. At first, she keeps this a secret and takes a path a mile longer, but once Link Deas finds out, he threatens Bob Ewell, and he protects and walks with her to make sure they stop (333-334). Link Deas goes out of his way and does unnecessary things to help Helen Robinson get by, even though she is a black woman. Link goes against the racist thinking of the time, and he helps out a black woman just because she is also a human; a student reader picks up that they should still help out and see people of other races kindly, and to support them even if they are expected not to. Clearly, the book shows how people fought against the problems of racism that was very prevalent at the time, and the problems that black people lived with because of the racist

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