The novel To Kill a Mockingbird is set in the Depression-era South. The novel was published in 1960. (I'm not sure exactly when the novel was written, but I remember reading that Harper Lee worked for more than a year on the novel.) These two pariods are very different, of course, and your question is a good one for a paper.
You may want to conduct some research (especially if the paper assignment calls for research) on the status of black Americans in the American South in the 1930s and in 1960. In the 1930s, for example, sharecropping (an institution that, in all honesty, wasn't all that different from slavery) was still very common. You can find an interesting discussion of sharecropping (complete with excellent photographs, including many of African American farm workers) in the work Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Tom Robbinson seems to me to have no better a life than a sharecropper in the novel; he lives in a small settlement of blacks and works a white man's farm for little pay.
The year 1960, the date of the novel's publication, is interesting in terms of race relations in the American South, too. It is the year in which sit-ins sprang up across the region to challenge segregation (i.e. the exclusion of blacks) at lunch counters and in other public spaces. The novel's treatment of the theme of tolerance seems to me to be very conservative or even ineffectual in the face of the radical actions and dramatic changes that were taking place across the country in the year the novel was published.
You will probalby also want to note that the novel's setting and narration are shaped by these two periods. THe narrative voice is of an adult woman (maybe in the last years of the 1950s) talking about her childhood (in the Depression years).
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