[ti:Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of 'To Kill a Mockingbird'] [ar:Steve Ember] [al:Education Report] [by:www.51voa.com] [00:00.00]This is the VOA Special English [00:03.28]Education Report. [00:04.65]Millions of high school students [00:07.20]have read "To Kill a Mockingbird." [00:10.12]The novel by Harper Lee [00:12.49]offers moral lessons [00:14.35]about racial justice and respect. [00:18.09]It tells the story of a young girl [00:20.70]named Scout and her father, [00:23.62] Atticus Finch, a lawyer. [00:25.80]He defends a black man wrongfully [00:29.47]accused of raping a white woman. [00:32.21]In the end, an all-white jury [00:35.75]sentences Tom Robinson to death. [00:39.30]The book is set in the American South [00:42.53]in the nineteen thirties. [00:44.46] But it was published fifty years ago, [00:47.88]on July eleventh, nineteen sixty. [00:51.30]It came out as the civil rights [00:54.54]movement in the United States [00:56.59]was gaining strength. [00:58.21]Laws and customs in the South, [01:01.94]however, still kept blacks [01:04.67]and whites mostly separated. [01:07.23]A mockingbird is a kind [01:10.46]of gray songbird. [01:12.26]The book gets its title [01:14.63]from something Atticus Finch [01:16.99]was told in his childhood [01:19.17]when his father gave him a gun. [01:21.28]Gregory Peck won an Academy Award [01:25.20]for the nineteen sixty-two film version. [01:28.62]ATTICUS FINCH: "I remember [01:30.79]when my daddy first gave me that gun, [01:33.03]he told me that I should never [01:34.64]point at anything in the house, [01:35.70]and that I could shoot all the [01:38.19]blue jays I wanted, [01:39.62]if I could hit them. [01:40.93]But remember, it was [01:42.54]a sin to kill a mockingbird." [01:44.39]Killing them is a sin, he explains, [01:46.94]because they don't hurt anyone, [01:49.18]they just make music. [01:51.30]And that is the moral of the story, [01:53.97]says Melinda Byrd-Murphy, [01:56.46]head of the Alabama Center [01:58.51]for Literary Arts. [02:00.63]She has read the book four times. [02:02.56]MELINDA BYRD-MURPHY: "I think if anything, [02:03.99]this story talks about humanity [02:06.79]and the universality of humans [02:09.09]and how there's goodness in people [02:11.02]and you just have to get [02:12.32]to know one another." [02:13.44]Ms. Byrd-Murphy [02:16.43]is a native of Harper Lee's [02:16.61]hometown of Monroeville. [02:18.29]The author, [02:19.85] who published only the one novel, [02:22.40]is still alive [02:23.77]but rarely speaks publicly. [02:26.69]Some people say [02:28.24]"To Kill a Mockingbird" [02:30.11]treats racism in a way [02:32.35]that is simplistic, [02:34.15]even offensive to blacks, [02:36.27]and out of date in today's America. [02:39.56]Still, it has been translated [02:42.49]into more than forty languages [02:44.98]and has sold over forty million copies. [02:48.65]It won a Pulitzer Prize [02:51.70]and is often required [02:53.31]reading in high school. [02:55.37]The story takes place in a town [02:58.41]that Harper Lee called Maycomb. [03:01.46]But she based the characters [03:03.58]on real people she knew growing up. [03:06.81]Since then, Monroeville has changed a lot. [03:10.92]A number of African-Americans [03:14.46]serve in the local government. [03:16.69]The courthouse, made famous [03:19.30]by the book, is now a museum. [03:21.54]A small shop and a fast-food restaurant [03:25.71]called Mel's Dairy Dream have [03:29.06]replaced Harper Lee's childhood home. [03:32.11]But in Monroeville and [03:34.73]around the country, fans of [03:36.47]"To Kill a Mockingbird" [03:38.58]are celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. [03:42.13]Events include readings, [03:44.43]discussions and movie showings. [03:47.35]And that's the VOA Special English [03:51.15]Education Report, [03:52.70]with reporting by Anna Boiko-Weyrauch. [03:56.06]I'm Steve Ember.