“To Kill A Mockingbird”: Who Does Atticus Finch Represent?

Posted By | June 3rd, 2010 | Category: Hot Topics | 6 comments Print This Post Print This Post

By Lee A. Daniels

Fifty years ago this summer, as the Civil Rights Movement was exploding across the land, a young, white Southern female writer published her first novel, a complex story of social and racial mores in a provincial southern Alabama town in the 1930s. Its title was To Kill A Mockingbird, and it rapidly became a social and literary phenomenon.

It has remained so – deservedly, I say, for varied literary reasons but especially because it appeared at a singular historical moment with a story that seemed to fit – as if it were a piece of the jigsaw puzzle – America’s contentious war over the status of black Americans and the morality of white Americans.

It certainly fit my life. Harper Lee’s novel, and the subsequent acclaimed 1962 movie, which starred Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch and Brock Peters as the doomed Tom Robinson, was a seamless piece of my reading on the black American past and present.

So, I look forward to the apparently limitless fiftieth-anniversary celebrations of the novel’s publication taking place this summer. And I hope that at least a few of those events will grapple with one question which for me has always shadowed, not the novel itself nor the film, but rather the public discussion of both.

That is, why is there so much focus on the “heroism” of Atticus Finch in confronting the racism of the town’s (and region’s) legal system and so little discussion of the fact that he lost. More to the point, why so little discussion of the fact that his client, the wrongly-accused black man, lost – and paid for it with his life?

Why is there so little discussion, whenever the novel is mentioned in the popular media, that Harper Lee crafted a novel in which nearly an entire white community conspires to or at least condones murder?

In the real life of the South before the mid-1960s, that perverse injustice – in which any black American could be swiftly and fatally caught in a maelstrom of horrific violence — was commonplace. For example, in his 2001 memoir, Vernon Can Read!, Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., recounts his experiences as a newly-minted lawyer in the summer of 1960 in Georgia working for the famed civil rights attorney Donald L. Hollowell.

In quick strokes, Jordan describes two cases there involving black men in capital murder cases: In one, the state’s highest officials ignored their hurried plea for a stay of execution. That meant that in the same year Mockingbird was published, their client was executed, Jordan writes, “by a poisonous combination of incompetence, hatred and indifference.”

In another case attorney Hollowell sought a new trial for another young black man, accused of murder, who had been arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to execution within forty-eight hours.

The story of what happened to Tom Robinson is the most important story in To Kill A Mockingbird; and the most important thing to remember about Atticus Finch is not that he was “heroic,” but that he was willing to be decent when the rest of the town’s white citizenry were not. For me, whenever I think of this important novel, what I first remember is that at the novel’s end, Atticus Finch is at home with his children but Tom Robinson is dead.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.

 

6 comments
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  1. Nadia Scores June 16th, 2010 7:50 am :

    My friends are tired of me talking about Atticus Finch! But I just love ‘To Kill A Mockingbird‘ and especially the character of Atticus. To me, he represents all the good things in man – honesty, integrity, righteousness. But above all, it’s his silent determination to stand for what he believes in that really impresses me. Not all of us are capable of that I feel. But here is a man who defends a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in an era when racial discrimination was at its peak. The setting plays an important role in the story and this was brought home to me when I visited Shmoop. I think the information there is a worth reading since it helps you to understand the book in its entirety.

  2. Don June 16th, 2010 10:15 pm :

    Oh, Atticus Smatticus! The black man still dies in this story so how much of a hero was Finch really? Boooo.

  3. Brenda Russell June 29th, 2010 4:05 pm :

    I happen to like the the story “To Kill a Mockingbird”, it is a timeless classic. I liked Atticus Finch, and felt that, in a way he was a hero. In the sense, that he stood up for a black man, just as anyone, who is decent, would stand up for anyone who is being wrongfully accused of doing something they didn’t do. He took a risk along with putting his family in jeopardy, in a racist town full of black-haters. That is the way it should be in this world, instead of continuing with this racist state of mind and living. If more people would start standing up for what is right, instead of standing up for the all mighty dollar, I know that this world would truly be a better place.

  4. Doug Hunt July 7th, 2010 8:06 pm :

    My way of celebrating the 50th anniversary of To Kill a Mockingbird was to publish a little book about what happened in my own town (Columbia, Missouri) in 1923, when a black man named James Scott was accused, falsely it seems, of raping the daughter of a college professor. The shortest version of the story is that Scott was lynched in front of a large crowd and with the blessing of much of the white establishment. The longer version is that the “Atticus” figure on the scene was Ruby Hulen, the county prosecutor, and that Hulen’s vacillations and failings show how HARD it was for a white man with impulses toward decency to stand up against the racist tide. As time passes readers may lose an understanding of the level of courage and self-assurance it would take for an Atticus Finch to behave as he behaved. If we want young people, especially, to GET IT, we may have to expose them to nonfiction, to history, and especially to occasions where no one rose to the level of heroism.

  5. Jasmine November 7th, 2010 6:19 pm :

    For me, whenever I think of this important novel, what I first remember is that at the novel’s end, Atticus Finch is at home with his children but Tom Robinson is dead.

    The author’s implications here are true, but not entirely true. Yes, Atticus Finch, a white lawyer who defends a black man, Tom Robinson, is home home with his children in the end of the story. However, in the previous scene, Atticus’ children were almost murdered in the woods, because of his defense. At the end, although they are all home together, Jem is lying unconcious in the bedroom with a broken arm.

    Tom Robinson, Boo Radley, and the children all represent the mockingbird. Bob Ewell, the rabid dog, the jury, the townspeople, etc, all represent the threat to kill.

    Atticus Finch is a hero, though. It was decent of him, yes. When he steps up to do what is right and defend Tom Robinson, Atticus takes on himself the the same hatred and threat of death that Tom Robinson is faced with. Not only does he take it on himself in defence of another person, but he understands when he makes this decision that his children will have to take it on to. And they do. But he still does what is right. And that is what makes him a hero.

  6. Greg Thrasher November 11th, 2010 1:37 pm :

    I have never enjoyed these white hero novels when they were in vogue…I resented them even more when folks start to celebrate the legacy of white hero fantasy and fiction like TKAMB….The troubling part of nonsense of this ilk is how it allows people to pay lip service to evils of racism from afar…