Are the Radleys black or white?throughout the whole book, I had pictured them to be black, but the other day, I watched the movie, and Boo Radley's...

Boo Radley is not only white, but he is as white as a ghost.  He has not seen the light of day since he was a young boy.  After he "stabbed" his parents with the scissors, he was first detained in the county courthouse prison and then in his own house for years.

TKAM was set in the deep South, where Jim Crow laws kept blacks from integrating with whites in schools and neighborhoods.  In other words, the whites live in white neighborhoods and the black live in black ones.  The Radleys live across the street from the Finches in the white section of Maycomb.  The Robinsons would have lived outside the city center in a black neighborhood.  There, they would attend an all-black church, the First Purchase church.  Cal invites the kids there; white adults would not have been so open minded in attendance.

Remember when Boo's brother shoots at the kids when they were snooping?  Pressed for a description of the suspect, Nathan Radley says it was a black man who must have been trying to rob him--such was the racism and fear of integration in the all-white neighborhood.