Just revisited Malcolm Gladwell's critique of Atticus Finch in the August 10, 2009 New Yorker. While Gladwell argues that Finch embodied the limitations of southern liberalism, I argue that Lee deliberately wrote Finch as a defense of segregation. My evidence lies in a letter that Lee penned to James Jackson Kilpatrick, the arch-segregationist from Virginia, in January 1966. Frustrated that a local school board in Hanover County Virginia had banned To Kill a Mockingbird for being "immoral," Lee sent Kilpatrick money to enroll the school board "in any first grade of its choice." At the time, southern states were busy shifting discriminatory practices from classifications based on color to moral regulations, restrictions on illegitimacy, marriage, and so on, as part of a larger effort to reframe southern resistance to Brown in explicitly Christian terms (for more on this, see my new piece: A Horrible Fascination: Sex, Segregation, and the Lost Politics of Obscenity). Lee joined this campaign, using Mockingbird to "spell out in words seldom more than two syllables" as she wrote Kilptrick, "a code of honor, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all southerners." Lee recovered this "code" during the Montgomery bus boycott, positioning her novel as a response to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s memoir Stride Toward Freedom (published in 1958), which framed the black freedom struggle in explicitly Christian terms, a crusade aimed at achieving racial justice and awakening southern whites to their racist evil through the strategy of non-violence. While John Marshall Law Prof Lance McMillen catches the Christian side of Finch, he misses the manner in which Finch's Christian "ethic" deliberately challenges the Christian ethic advanced by Martin Luther King, Jr., transforming Christianity itself into a cultural front in the constitutional struggle for civil rights.
Interesting post. This take on Lee is a new one for me. I will delve into it with great interest. My article that you linked to developed into a dialogue with Professor Judy Cornett on this same theme in the Tennessee Law Review. My other contribution to this dialogue is "Atticus Finch -- Christian?", located here:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1765196
Since you mentioned Gladwell, I will post an e-mail response he wrote after reading my article:
"When it comes to "To Kill a Mockingbird," I think Lance McMillian and I are in agreement on one very crucial fact. The motivations of Atticus Finch are a good deal more complex than is commonly believed. Finch is not a two-dimension hero. The real genius of the book, in fact, is in its willingness to allow for the many contradictions of the Jim Crow south. By my count, for example, there are at least three "Finches" operating in paralell. There is the legal Finch, who must defend a black man accused of rape. There is the political Finch, who must operate in a town and community suffering under the weight of Jim Crow. And, as Prof. McMillian points out very persusively, there is the Christian Finch, who is driven to uphold the standards of his faith.
My article belongs to a school of critque (featuring Goodman and Lubet and many others) that finds the legal Finch in contradiction with the political Finch. That's why I spent as much time as I did talking about the pecularity of Finch's behavior in the courtroom, in which, among other things, he is quite happy to brutalize the helpless Mayella's reputation in defense of his client. That was in keeping with the heirarchy of prejudice in the pre-War South, in which male perogatives trumped even racial perogatives. As I pointed out, it was not uncommon for black men accused of raping white women in the Deep South to either go free and recieve light sentences if their lawyer was able to portray the victim as morally loose white trash, which is precisely the tactic Finch pursues with Mayella. As I wrote of Finch's courtroom strategy: "We are back in the embrace of Folsomism. Finch wants his white, male jurors to do the right thing. But as a good Jim Crow liberal he dare not challenge the foundations of their privilege. Instead, Finch does what lawyers for black men did in those days. He encourages them to swap one of their prejudices for another."
Prof. McMillian, it seems to me, is making a second and more insightful extension of this argument. He thinks that the "Christian" Finch is in contradiction to the poliitical Finch. I want Finch to do more to challenge the power structure of Maycomb. But McMillian points out--very persuasively, I thought--that his Christian position compells him to stick to the hearts and minds approach. What is Finch to do? He cannot simultaneously service these three very different constituencies. We are left with is a book that very powerfully illustrates the impossible moral dilemma of the righteous man in the Jim Crow South--whose profession, faith and larger social and political responsibilites pull him in three different directions. I found :Prof. McMillian's arguments very persuasive. But I wasn't left with the impression that his essay invalidated my own arguments. My thought was simply that if both of our articles were read alongside "To Kill a Mockingbird," it might help the book's readers appreciate the full dimension of Harper Lee's genius."
Posted by: Lance McMillian | February 20, 2011 at 12:43 PM
The sum total of what Harper Lee says in the letter to James Jackson Kilpatrick (as quoted by the NY Times -- which seems to be Professor Anders' source based on his SSRN article) is this:
"Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that 'To Kill A Mockingbird' spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners. To hear that the novel is 'immoral' has made me count the years between now and 1984, for I have yet to come across a better example of doublethink. I feel that the problem is one of illiteracy. Therefore, I enclose a small contribution to the Beadle Bumble Fund that I hope will be used to enroll the Hanover County School Board in any first grade of its choice."
I find it hard to square these words with the contention that Lee joined the "effort to reframe southern resistance to Brown in explicitly Christian terms" (seemingly making her a closet segregationist) and indeed wrote "To Kill A Mockingbird" as part of that effort and to respond critically to Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Stride Toward Freedom."
Rather, Lee seems simply to think that the school board was a bunch of idiots for banning her book as "immoral," when instead her book was exceedingly moral because it portrayed its hero living as an authentic Christian should (in contrast to most of the South at that time).
Significantly, at the time of its release, no one understood "To Kill A Mockingbird" to be a defense of segregation. Everyone understood it to be as anti-segregation, which is why it was so threatening to the racist Hanover County School Board.
Finally, I see little in "To Kill A Mockingbird" as a rebuke to Martin Luther King's vision of Christian ethics. As a I describe in my original response to Malcolm Gladwell, both Atticus Finch and Martin Luther King use the strength of their characters to shame racists to abandon their racist ways -- what Gladwell belittles as the hearts-and-mind approach.
Posted by: Lance McMillian | February 21, 2011 at 01:30 PM
Great comments. To my mind, Lee wasn't a "closet" segregationist, she just didn't view segregation to be as evil as Martin Luther King, Jr. and the movement portrayed it to be. This was a common position among the South's white elite (as I argue in my book: The Ghost of Jim Crow: How Southern Moderates Used Brown v. Board of Education to Stall Civil Rights). For southern moderates, the whole project of integration was misguided; what African Americans really needed was money, services, and jobs, something that moderate governors like Florida's LeRoy Collins worked to arrange. King not only rejected this position, he resented it; arguing in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail" that white moderates, not the Klan, were the greatest foes of civil rights.
Posted by: Anders Walker | February 23, 2011 at 08:42 PM