Chapter 16-17: Explain Atticus’ explanation about the mob dispersing. What is a mob made of? How was it broken up? How does his explanation relate to one of themes of the book?(Ja’Niya)

    In the opening of chapter 16, Atticus, Scout, and Jem started to talk about the night at the jail cell. As Scouts starts to question why Mr. Cunningham wanted to hurt her father, Atticus reassures her that Mr. Cunningham is still their friend. He claims that the mob was made up of people, and even though Mr. Cunningham was apart of it he was still a man. “Mr. Cunningham’s basically a good man. He just has blind spots… A mob’s always made up of people, no matter what Cunningham was part of a mob last night, but he was still a man.”(Lee 210) Atticus also addresses how a mob of wild animals was stopped by one little kid. “That a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they’re still human.”(210) Scout started to talk about Walter, and his entailments to Mr. Cunningham, that astonished everyone including Atticus and made Mr. Cunningham call off the mob. How Scout started to talk about his son and his personal life, Mr. Cunningham had a realization of how wrong it was to try to hurt Atticus in front of his own kids. “Then he did a peculiar thing. He squatted down and took me by both shoulders...Then he straightened up and waved a big paw.”(206). This is where he realizes that Scout does really understand a lot and knows that they are here to harm. Atticus’s explanation relates to the lesson he taught Scout about thinking of other people’s lives. The piece of advice was, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view...Until you climb into his skin and walk around in it”.(39) Mr. Cunningham realizes that Scout is a brilliant kid and can understand a lot, and began to walk in Atticus’s shoes. This caused him to realize the tuff spot Atticus was in, so he called off the mob. The night at the jailhouse was very terrifying for Atticus and Tom, if Scout were not there watching from the shadows everything might have gone totally different.