What is the impact of Maycomb's society, unlike ours today?

Maycomb is an Alabama town that seems quite typical for a small southern town of that era. Maycomb is old and set in its ways. Like many small towns, there are few secrets and everybody seems like they have been there forever. Check out Scout's quote from the first chapter,

"Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it... There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County..."

One would hope the American South has changed by now but I can't say. California was historically more tolerant of race than the South was.