I like what the previous posters have said, but I'm not sure that it's necessary to see Atticus' statement in Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird as prophetic -- or at least not anymore prophetic than it is responsive (on the part of the author) to the dramatic enactments of racial tension across the South and the border states in the 1950s, the decade before the publication of Lee's novel.
Any decent Civil Rights timeline (see, for example, the two PBS links given below) will show a number of significant events, including, for example, the Supreme court decision on Brown v. Board of Education, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and the internationally covered lynching of Emmett Till.
At least one critic has written convincingly about the parallels between the Till trial and the Robinson trial in the novel; the critic doesn't attempt to show that the real trial entirely influenced the fictional trial, but he does demonstrate how the extreme media coverage of this lynching (or perhaps a more local, less publicized but parallel case) may have inspired the author. See Chura, Patrick. "Prolepsis and Anachronism: Emmett Till and the Historicity of To Kill a Mockingbird." Southern Literary Journal. (June 2000): 1-26.
The final link given here is a solid lesson plan on the historical contexts of Lee's novel.
To me, Atticus' language -- the metaphor of the growing debt, much like his talk of the "sin" of killing a mockingbird -- seems at least a little religious in nature (in a popular Christian sense). It echoes the idea of someone writing in each person's ledger and each person having to give a full accounting in the end, only it applies not to the individual but to the society as a whole ("we").
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