Mockingbird’s Race Limitations

 

Atticus Finch and Tom Robinson in court

Atticus Finch and Tom Robinson in court

An interesting Malcolm Gladwell article in the most recent New Yorker has complicated my views of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which I posted on last week.  I now better understand why the book, while a comfort to me as a child going through the desegregation battles, proved so inadequate when I went north six years later.

In last week’s post I mentioned that I saw my father as an Atticus Finch, heroic in his efforts to desegregate the Franklin County school system.   I also talked about how my encounter with the ideas of black militants when I began attending Carleton College in 1969 came as a complete shock to me given this background.  Gladwell fills out the picture in useful ways.

Atticus Finch, he says, is a southerner in the tradition of Big Jim Folsom, Alabama governor in 1947-51 and again in 1955-59.  Folsom was a populist politician, very colorful, who is most famous for his support of integration and civil rights.  But Gladwell qualifies this description.  He notes that Folsom did not advocate repealing Jim Crow laws but simply felt that all people were equal and acted accordingly.  For him, race relations were a personal matter, not an institutional one.

I must step in a moment to note that Gladwell doesn’t point to one contrast between the two figures: Finch is a patrician, Folsom a populist.  I know southern patricians, having grown up with them in the Sewanee “domain” of the University of the South.  Finch is a lawyer and is on good terms with the white power structure (such as the judge and the sheriff).  He does not rail against corporate interests, as did Folsom.  But other than that, their race views are similar. 

Folsom, Gladwell notes, was unprepared for the vicious racism that erupted in Alabama (and throughout the south) in response to the Brown vs. Board of Education desegregation ruling.  Moderates who were counting on gradualism to end segregation found themselves swamped in the backlash to the court order.  Folsom lost in his attempt to serve as governor a third term in 1963 when he ran against the vocal segregationist George Wallace, famous for saying (after himself losing the governorship to an ardent racist) that he would “never be outniggered again.”

Harper Lee’s vision is that people of different races are decent (with the exception of incestuous white trash like Bob Ewell) and will learn to respect each other if only given the time.  If saintly blacks are patient, all will ultimately be well.  In the book’s view, groups like the KKK and the lynch mob can be defused by shame.  And blacks stand in reverence as a great white man walks out of the courtroom.

I described my father as having certain Atticus Finch qualities (I could also have mentioned his deep love for birds), but there are also a number of differences.  My father is a gadfly rather than a patriarch.  Others in the community saw him as a “northern liberal” and an “outside agitator,” stirring up problems where supposedly there were no problems. Rather than connecting with the white establishment, he joined with black families to use the judicial system against that establishment.  It’s a different story than Harper Lee’s.

So To Kill a Mockingbird has some of the limitations of southern moderates at the time.  Despite the reservations that Gladwell has raised in me, however, I do not disavow my deep love of the book.  Moderates like Finch don’t always do well when confrontation is called for, but they are critical if society is to regain its footing following dramatic change.  My sense is that someone with Atticus Finch’s wisdom and sensitivity will grow as the world evolves rather than retreating into irrelevance or reactionary bitterness.  Parts of the book may be antiquated or offensive today—I haven’t even touched on its problematic handling of such issues as gender and class, the female rape victim and the poor whites—but it has a deep humanity that, in my mind, compensates for its shortcomings.  Books like this can help us become more tolerant people. 

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