Harper Lee 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 […]
Tag Archives: To Kill a Mockingbird
How Racism Sullies Everything
If race has been the subject of these past two weeks of posting it is because, as a Sherrilyn Ifil article notes in the on-line publication Root, we are having a hard time talking about race this summer, what with the furor over the Sonia Sotomayor nomination and the Henry Louis Gates affair. I haven’t […]
Mockingbird’s Race Limitations
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 […]
Desegregation Tales from My Childhood
I mentioned yesterday the debt I owe to the NAACP, which this year is celebrating its 100-year anniversary. Today I will talk about some of my past history with the organization, along with a discussion of how Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird helped me in some difficult years during the Civil Rights era. I’ve […]