Saturday, Oct 11, 8pm at Every Thing Goes Book Cafe & Neighborhood Stage, 208 Bay Street, SINY 10301

This event is part of Second Saturday, a free monthly art walk on Staten Island’s North Shore.

Joan & Gary Moore, with special guest Jeannine Otis, will perform music of the American Civil Rights movement, which underscored key events that coincided with the publication of “To Kill a Mockingbird”.  In fact, some of those events occurred in Selma, Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama, not far from Harper Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama (the inspiration for Mockingbird’s fictional town of Maycomb, Alabama).

Our cast of readers includes:  Joan Pipkins, David Seeley (who worked on enforcement of the Civil Rights Act as a young attorney with the Dept of Justice), Rachel Isaacs, Ted Lochwyn, Edwina Martin & Dawn Reid-Green,   We’ll discuss excerpts from the novel, together with texts concerning some of the flashpoints in the American civil rights movement that Mockingbird helped catalyze.

For example, we’ll feature two new books about the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act in honor of its 50th anniversary.

We’ll consider the 60th anniversaries of the death of Emmett Till, and of the U. S. Supreme Court’s historic school desegregation decision. We’ll recall the courage of the Freedom Riders. We’ll also explore texts concerning the Scottsboro Boys, which partly inspired the courtroom chapter in “Mockingbird”.