Thank you for being such a good teacher!
I don’t know why, but we never read TKAM in high school. My daughter read it when she was in 9th or 10th grade. She loves it and had to take her copy away to college with her. Hubby had a college professor who had been a high school teacher in Jackson, MS in 1960 or so. She kept a copy in her desk for students who wanted to read it. The book had been banned from the school. It may have been banned from the entire district. My aunt used the novel in her classes until she retired about ten years ago. She was a Bama grad, too.
Isn't it odd that literature which tells painful truths, but are ultimately respectful, of a culture or area is often banned -- unofficially, if not officially.
When I went to high school in Oklahoma in the fifties, The Grapes of Wrath was a forbidden book. It wasn't taught, it wasn't in the school libraries. It wasn't even much remarked upon.
Having gained a taste for Steinbeck via Tortilla Flat, though, I undertook The Grapes of Wrath in college...and was blown away. The inner strengths of the Joads taught me much about the character of my forebearers and made me proud of where I hailed from.
With To Kill A Mockingbird<, Grapes remains one of the most significant books of my lifetime.