To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960. The movie was made in 1962.

[Stinky The Clown]

When did it first come to your attention or (at least) enter your consciousness?

It was a reading assignment for me in my senior year in high school in 1964/65.

[femmocrat]

1. I read it in high school, too.

And my kids read it while they were in high school. Some things never change.

[virgogal]

2. I read it in 1960 when it first came out. Big bestseller.

[LaurenG]

3. I think I watched it on TV on Monday Night at the Movies

or one of those but it was the 70's I think.

[Honeycombe8]

4. When I was a child in the 60's. Saw the movie, I guess.

I have no memory of ever NOT remembering the movie. Good movie.

[Bluenorthwest]

5. I was an infant...what this post makes me think is this: Damn, Gregory Peck was on his

game getting that on screen so fast, so well. Saw a great stage adaptation last season at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

[Luminous Animal]

9. The title sequence of the film is beautiful...

http://www.artofthetitle.com/2008/09/10/to-kill-a-mockingbird/

[maddezmom]

6. read Jr year in HS

early 80's but I know I watched the movie with my parents well before then.

[Luminous Animal]

7. My mom gave it to me to read when I was about 10 so that would

be about 1967.

[madinmaryland]

8. I read it in HS in the late 70's and my daughter just read it

as a freshman in HS.

[freshwest]

10. Early sixties. Just before Medgar Evers was killed. Father explained a lot to me after that.

[TlalocW]

11. Saw references to it

In the comic strip, "Bloom County." Read it in high school English, and they showed us the movie as well. I agree with Opus that it's the great American novel.

TlalocW

[happyslug]

12. Never read it, not assigned when I was in High School

And I went to an inner city High School in the mid 1970s. Never watched the movie either, not my type of movie. Worse when I was in Grade School, my then Suburban school had a lot of be nice to African Americans handouts and other reading material. I took it as free material provided by the Federal Government do to the race riot following Martin Luther King's assassination.

Recently I found out that my Grade School had been involved with a Shooting between local white miners on strike during the 1928 mining strike, and some African Americans brought in as strike breakers. While the School shooting had been 40 years before my time in that school (we are talking of 1968) the fact that the school I attended was built in 1929, do to how bad the old Broughton School had been shot up in 1928.

One of the problems with Allegheny County and its County Seat of Pittsburgh PA, was it was the heart of the 1928 coal strike, one of the nastiest coal strikes ever. Every School in the Pittsburgh Seam of Coal, except Broughton, had been taken over by the coal miners who forbade any child whose father was on strike to go to school. In Broughton the Miners had taken over the School and keeping it open to all students.

In retaliation for this, the coal mine owners imported African Americans with the offer of good wages and NOT telling them of the Strike, then throwing them into the mines. This caused tensions, made worse by the Coal Mine Owners giving pistols to the African Americans to "defend themselves" (i.e. fire on the strikers, and when the strikers fired back, arrest the strikers, hopefully for murder of the African Americans).

That apparently what happened, some African Americans carrying pistols were walking along the railroad tracks across the road from the old Broughton School. Someone opened fired (The local Justice of the Peace ruled it was the African Americans, a position upheld by the County Courts). No one appears to have been killed, but the school was shot up.

Thus the reason for the African American tolerance data was NOT the ongoing riots in Pittsburgh proper, but the tensions in the local area that remained from that old coal strike and its shoot out at the School.

For the reason, something like "To Kill a Mockingbird" was NOT going to be read in the local area. African Americans being used as Strike Breakers were to fresh in to many minds. It has only been 40 years since I was in that Grade School and I am just in my early 50s. It was 40 years between 1928 and 1968. Many of the people who participated in the 1928 strike and shoot out were still alive in 1968 and remembering it, not with happy memories. Thus something like "To Kill a Mockingbird" would bring up to many bad memories for it to be required reading in some place like Allegheny County Pennsylvania.

[ananda]

13. In high school..

That book just blew me away, I could hardly wait to see the movie. We all knew it would be great with Gregory Peck in it, but it exceeded anything we could have imagined. I still find myself just blown away by the great storytelling and message. In fact, I recently read an introductory bio of Alexander Pope prior to reading "Rape of the Lock," and I must say it felt pretty good learning that Pope gave his erstwhile friend Addison the name "Atticus" in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, also great reading.

[CBHagman]

14. I remember hearing about the movie when I was a kid...

...though I don't think I actually saw it until I was a teenager. I read the novel when I was 12 years old and loved it, could remember passages of it for a long time afterwards.

[ananda]

15. A favorite quote...

A person's conscience does not abide by the majority of the people. - Atticus Finch in Ch. 11

[Lydia Leftcoast]

16. I remember a feature in Life Magazine about casting the children,

but I didn't read the book till high school, which would be in the late 1960s.

I think I saw the movie on TV a bit later. The Big Three networks used to have movie nights where they'd show movies that had been released in the past five years or so.

I also saw it on TV in Japan, dubbed into Japanese, which was a bizarre experience, but no bizarre than seeing South Pacific, Rebel Without a Cause, All About Eve, Gone With the Wind, Columbo, and Peyton Place dubbed into Japanese. (For South Pacific, they removed all references to World War II, which made for some interesting plot holes.)

[Brother Buzz]

17. It made it to television very quick

before 1964. I didn't read the novel until 1968.

[begin_within]

18. Read it in high school (1975) but had already seen the movie.

[elleng]

19. Don't recall, Freshman year/college?

Its COMING TO A THEATER NEAR YOU NOW!!!

[KT2000]

20. my mother bought the soundtrack

album, which I love. I read the book after hearing the music and no doubt my mother encouraged me - jr high school age. It was never assigned though.

[virgdem]

21. Read it in 1968...

it was assigned by my English teacher in 10th grade and I remember having to write a paper on the book.

[Raine]

22. I had to do a book report in high school and had lost library privileges

because of having so many overdue books. I really needed a book so a friend said I could read the one she was going to use ... To Kill a Mockingbird. I wasn't a very good student but the teacher was really impressed with "my" choice of books. I think she got awhole new respect for me. It was a good choice (though not mine) because I LOVED the book.

[Art_from_Ark]

23. I watched the movie on TV in 1967 or 68

but I was not quite old enough to understand what it was all about. I watched it again last year and it hit me like a ton of bricks.

[MineralMan]

24. I read the book in 1961 and saw the movie

when it came out. Both were eye openers to a high school kid from a small farming town in California.

[TheManInTheMac]

25. Sixth grade, 1976, saw the movie on TV. Funny story about that.

My parents were divorced four years earlier. My father wouldn't own a color TV-- swore they would turn your eyes to jelly. After the divorce, my mother (a single, working mother of four in the early seventies) couldn't afford one. She worked hard, we got by, but food and rent were about all she could afford those first few years.

Then she found a used one in the want ads for a couple hundred bucks. Bought it, brought it home. We channel surfed (with the six or seven channels that our rural cable company offered, that's the equivalent of surfing in Will's Creek), before deciding to watch To Kill a Mockingbird.

Our first day with a color TV and we watched a black and white movie. To this day, I love telling that story. The irony of it, and the fact that that movie, and the novel about a week later, saved me from the racist culture of Southeastern Ohio. Even at twelve years old, that film made me want to be a better person. Still does, to this day.