The Civil Rights Movement

Fueled with the speeches of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and with the deaths of several African-American activists, the civil rights movement was at its peak in 1955. Just the year before, the Supreme Court of the United States had struck down legal segregation in schools in a landmark decision. In 1955, Rosa Parks of Montgomery, Alabama, made her heroic and famous decision not to give up her seat on the bus to a white man. This single action engendered a widespread bus boycott which catapulted its organizer, Martin Luther King, Jr., to national attention. Georgia, where O'Connor lived and set the story, was filled with racial tension. The Grandmother's attitudes toward African Americans typify the beliefs of many in the state at the time. When she tells June Star that "Little niggers in the country don't have things like we do," she was expressing a...