Discuss the nature of prejudice in "To Kill a Mockingbird" by studying the way Harper Lee presents the black characters and the social stratification of Maycomb.

In the American south many years ago, the southern states fought to keep slavery legal in the civil war against the northern states, who wanted it abolished. Even though they may have lost the war, the attitudes of the people had to blacks did not change and would ensure that the more modern liberal ideas of equality between the races and equal justice would never really work, however law enforced they may have been. The fact Atticus says "we were licked a hundred years before we started" shows that it was already happening before the people of the present southern states were even born.…