Is Harper Lee challenging the status quo about race relations through To Kill a Mockingbird or merely describing life as it is in Maycomb?

Coming in the wake of the famous case of Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, there is little doubt that Harper Lee challenges the concept of racial relations in her home state of Alabama in the 1950s.  After all, the South took years before they finally integrated their public schools.  And, just two years before the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, a black teen was killed because he whistled at a white woman in a grocery store in Alabama's neighboring state, Mississippi. However, the two men accused were acquitted by the all-white jury of men much as Bob Ewell was not charged and Tom Robinson accused.

With a setting parallel to these major events, and with realistic portrayals that reflected the segregated South, such as the jury of all white males and a trial of a man who also is accused of being forward with a white woman, there is, clearly, evidence of the author, Harper Lee, issuing a challenge to those who hold to the status quo regarding race relations.