Mockingbird, Powerful but Problematic

National Public Radio reminded me yesterday that this summer is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. I have written a couple of times about the book, once talking about its importance to me growing up in the segregated south and once examining Malcolm Gladwell’s critique of it in the New Yorker.

You can read those two posts here and here. I describe how the book gave me a supportive narrative as my family, joining with black families, battled school segregation.  I also acknowledge that Gladwell has a point when he exposes Harper Lee’s white liberal limitations.

Gladwell, for instance, complains that the book does not fully acknowledge the threat of violence, implicit when not explicit, that sustained segregation. To Kill a Mockingbird harkens back to a patrician south and doesn’t grapple with the new George Wallace racism that the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision had fanned into a white heat. He points out that Lee underestimates the power of the KKK, and he finds naïve the notion that a little girl could appeal to the conscience of a lynch mob. He notes that the book’s ending, where retributive justice seems to have been accomplished, masks the liberal crisis: Atticus and the sheriff have to rely on Boo Radley’s vigilantism to make things right.

Seeing the book this way gives us another perspective on why Harper Lee never wrote another book: maybe she felt that history passed her by.

In NPR’s interview with Mary McDonagh Murphy, who has just published Scout, Atticus, and Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird, I heard stories that coincided with my experience of the book but heard no mention of Gladwell’s objections.

Not all readers of color have responded as Gladwell does, however. NPR talked with one southern black woman who remembers the book holding out important hope. She said she saw Tom Robinson as the hero, a black man who, under impossible circumstances, did what he could to protect his family. In Atticus Finch, meanwhile, she saw the possibility of working with whites to change the system.

The difference between the two readings is the difference between the liberal and the radical perspective. The liberal assumes that people of good will can make a difference and that significant change can occur incrementally. The radical assumes that institutions have to be upended wholesale or that we will remain stuck forever. Neither perspective has all the answers. A continuing dialogue between the two is essential if meaningful change is to occur and take root.