Atticus Finch

by Joseph Crespino

  Candler was a deeply conservative racial paternalist, and certainly no crusader. As lynchings across the South increased in number in the 1890s, he was slow compared to other white religious leaders in speaking out against them. Yet by 1903, in a public letter reprinted in newspapers as far away as New York and St. Louis, Candler roundly rejected lynching as “an outburst of anarchy” and denounced the politicians and newspaper columnists who agitated on its behalf. Over the years in letters and sermons published in the Atlanta Journal and reprinted in newspapers throughout the South, Candler denounced lynching as “an inexcusable outrage.” Anyone who promoted it was “in the sight of God an accessory to murder, if not an outright and downright murderer” whom “God will not hold… guiltless when the Lord ‘maketh inquisition for blood.’” Included in this admonition were courts that “ought not to try with indecent haste prisoners… nor sentence men to death to appease the passions of the mobs.”

  In his newspaper, Lee valorized southern politicians and lawmen who stood up to the lynch mob. A front-page story from June 1930 told of South Carolina governor John G. Richards’s scathing denunciation of a sheriff who had failed to notify the governor’s office in time to protect the life of a black man alleged to have attacked two young white women. The governor called the sheriff’s actions “utterly reprehensible,” and implied that he had been complicit with the mob, a common occurrence and one that anti-lynching groups had been drawing attention to for years. Perhaps Lee had this problem in mind when he ran another front-page story the following month about the sheriff in Jefferson County, Texas. This “robust and stout hearted” man was reported to have singlehandedly dispersed a mob that had come for a black prisoner accused of attacking a white woman.

  The danger of the lynch mob and the threat it posed to civilized society was no abstraction for A. C. Lee. One of the most gruesome mob lynchings in the entire history of the practice hit close to home for Lee, literally. It took place in 1934 outside Marianna, Florida, the county where A. C. Lee was raised, where his mother and father were buried, and where all of his brothers and sisters still lived. In a scene similar to the one that Harper Lee would imagine in Mockingbird, a group of men traveling in four or five cars abducted a black prisoner from the jail in Brewton, Alabama, just forty miles south of Monroeville near the Florida state line. The black man, Claude Neal, was accused of having raped and murdered a white woman, Lola Cannidy, in a rural area in Jackson County, Florida. Neal, along with his mother and aunt, was initially taken to the jail in the nearby town of Chipley, A. C. Lee’s hometown. Neal confessed to the crime, although investigators would later suspect that he had been coerced. In a detail that was similar to how in Mockingbird Tom Robinson testified that he had encountered Mayella Ewell on the day of the alleged rape, Claude Neal told how he had been walking along the fenced border of the Cannidy farm when Lola Cannidy saw him and asked if he would come across the fence and clean out a hog trough that she had been struggling with (Mayella Ewell asks Tom Robinson if he would bust up a chiffarobe for her).

  The men who took Claude Neal from the jail in Brewton carried him back to the Cannidy family farm outside Marianna. A crowd estimated at several thousand people had gathered there, stoked by radio announcements and newspaper headlines earlier in the day. The horde became so large and unruly that Neal’s abductors worried that they couldn’t control it. So they took Neal to an alternative location and murdered him, but not before subjecting him to two hours of sadistic torture, including castration, forced autocannibalism, stabbing, burning with hot irons, and dismemberment of toes and fingers. They tied Neal’s body to the back of a car and dragged it to the Cannidy family home, where the remnants of the mob performed their own barbaric acts. Eventually Neal’s mutilated corpse was hung from a tree on the northeast corner of the courthouse square in Marianna.

  The Monroe Journal ran a story about the grand jury investigation into Neal’s abduction from the Brewton jail, though it included none of the sickening details of the lynching. That was the first news about the lynching to appear in the Journal, yet it was unlikely to have been the first time that A. C. Lee had heard of the incident. The Monroe Journal office received wire reports from the major news agencies. On October 21, the Associated Press sent a dispatch from Lee’s hometown of Chipley that reported that hundreds of men swarmed the streets all night threatening to destroy the jail if the sheriff didn’t hand over Neal and the other prisoners.

  Or perhaps Lee learned directly from his brothers or sisters about the mayhem in Marianna the day after the lynching. Neal’s body was cut down from the tree on the courthouse lawn early on a Saturday morning. The rest of that day, a busy Saturday when rural whites and blacks customarily came into town to shop and do business, was, according to one local white man, “a day of terror and madness, never to be forgotten by anyone.” Mobs of whites began attacking blacks around the town square who were there buying or selling goods, or who worked for white store owners. Marianna’s mayor searched for policemen but couldn’t find any; apparently members of the mob had already found them and threatened them with reprisals if they came to the square. The mayor attempted to deputize special officers, but could find no volunteers. One black man who was assaulted on a sidewalk raced across the street into the courthouse where a group of friendly white men, armed with a machine gun, offered protection for him and another black man. The mob attacked a black porter helping a customer. The porter had to slash his way through the crowd with a knife to make it back to his employer’s store, where the owner locked the door and held the mob at bay with a shotgun. A white woman only narrowly managed to protect the black maid that she had brought to town to help with her shopping. After emptying the streets downtown, the mob turned to the nearby white neighborhood with the oldest, grandest homes in town, looking for other black maids to attack. Some white women had already sent their maids home; others hid them in closets. Order was not restored in Marianna until late Saturday afternoon when a detachment of National Guardsmen, called up by the governor, arrived from Apalachicola.

  This was utter chaos, the kind of thing loathed by mayors, town councilmen, bankers, members of the bar, newspaper editors, storeowners—in short, people of A. C. Lee’s class. Blacks were the targets of the mob’s violence in Marianna, but the mob’s message was not to blacks alone. It was a warning also to whites who ran the town council and the businesses on the square, who employed blacks in their stores or in their fancy homes nearby, that if they couldn’t protect white women in Jackson County, then the mob would. This was an example of the common confrontation within the southern white community between town folks and rural whites. The Claude Neal lynching showed the violence and the evil of which the mob was capable. It also showed the fragility of law, order, and civility in a small southern town. A man like A. C. Lee would not have taken any of these for granted.

  William Faulkner had a metaphor that captured well the challenge for town folk. In Intruder in the Dust (1948), a large crowd comes in from the country to see if Lucas Beauchamp, a black man imprisoned in the county jail, will be lynched. A sullen group of men gather in the street in front of the jail, blocking traffic. The sheriff instructs a marshal to move them back onto the sidewalk. “Come on, boys,” the marshal says, weakly. “There’s other folks besides you wants to get up where they can watch them bricks.” Faulkner continued,

  They moved then but still without haste, the marshal herding them back across the street like a woman driving a flock of hens across a pen, she to control merely the direction not the speed and not too much of that, the fowls moving ahead of her flapping apron not recalcitrant, just unpredictable, fearless of her and not yet even alarmed.

  The unpredictability of country folks was an everyday reality for a town leader like Lee. His daughter would invoke this tension in Mockingbird in the calculations of men like Sheriff Heck Tate and Link Deas, Tom Robinson’s employer, who pay a visit to Atticus after dinner one evening to share their concerns about the suspe
cted activities of the rural white families who lived out at Old Sarum.

  By the 1930s, it wasn’t just law and order that was at stake, but home rule itself. In his thinking on this issue, A. C. Lee diverged starkly from the Atticus of Mockingbird. The Claude Neal lynching is again revealing. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) sent a young white minister to Marianna to investigate the lynching and write a report, which the organization published in pamphlet form and sent to thousands of ministers around the country. The horrific details of mob violence, combined with the fact that the abduction that had resulted in a lynching had taken place across state lines, led to a renewed effort in the US Congress for a federal anti-lynching law. The first such proposal had been introduced back in 1922 and was blocked by a filibuster by southern senators. The southerners would do the same to the bill introduced in 1935 following the Neal lynching, and again in 1938. A. C. Lee lauded the opposition to the 1938 bill in his newspaper. He was convinced that its backers did not have law or morality on their minds, just raw politics. “They seem to think such efforts will win the negro votes in the northern states,” he wrote in an editorial.

  Lee knew that powerful interests outside of Alabama were looking closely at how southern courts operated. This was why he had been eager to publicize Archie Sheffield’s conviction in 1930, and it would have factored into his 1934 decision to lead citizens of Monroe County to petition Governor B. M. Miller to commute the sentences of two black men in the county from death to life in prison, a request with which Miller complied in both cases. It was why Lee castigated the white citizens of Tuscaloosa County who had participated in a lynching in 1933. There was “no shadow of excuse,” he wrote. The victim had been charged with a crime and apprehended; every indication was that “punishment commensurate with the offense would probably have been meted out to him in due course and in the orderly way.”

  But the outside attention also irritated Lee and made him defensive, a nearly universal feeling among white southerners of his generation, and one that survived into his daughter’s generation as well. They were extremely sensitive to any mockery, condescension, or suspicion from a northern audience. For A. C. Lee, the political forces that threatened state and local control of Alabama’s courts were of a piece with the cultural forces that looked down upon white southerners as denizens of a hopelessly backward, impoverished, and uncouth region—the “Sahara of the Bozart” in the famous phrase of H. L. Mencken.

  A. C. Lee’s resentment appeared, albeit in a characteristically subdued way, in his editorials on the most controversial case to come out of Alabama courts in the 1930s. In the town of Scottsboro in northeast Alabama, authorities arrested nine black youths in 1931 and charged them with having raped two white women. The accused had only barely escaped a lynch mob, and, hoping to avoid such an outcome, local officials organized a hasty trial in which eight of the nine accused were convicted and sentenced to death. News of the case made it into the Monroe Journal only after the International Labor Defense took up the boys’ appeal, but even then the details were sketchy. A. C. Lee editorialized about some unnamed organization “principally from outside of Alabama” that would only irritate competent, well-meaning state and court officials and make it all the more unlikely that the defendants would get a fair hearing. He scoffed at a February 1936 article in Time magazine that, according to Lee, gave the impression that, for Negroes, Alabama courts were “simply perfunctory farces, and never utilized as an instrumentality for the disposition of justice.” Interestingly, he wrote nothing about the June 1933 decision by Judge James E. Horton Jr., the white, native Alabaman who set aside the verdict against the defendants in the second court case and ordered a new trial. Horton’s decision has often been cited as a real-life example of the kind of bravery that Atticus Finch showed in defending Tom Robinson. If Horton’s decision was any inspiration to Harper Lee in crafting Mockingbird, it was not because her father took much note of it in print.

  A. C. Lee’s most heated commentary came in reaction to a widely publicized quote by New York attorney Samuel Leibowitz, the lawyer hired to defend the boys after their original conviction was vacated by the US Supreme Court. Leibowitz called the conviction in the second trial “an act of bigots spitting upon the tomb of the immortal Abraham Lincoln.” Lee wrote in response,

  This brazen insult was hurled at a jury of twelve representative citizens of Morgan County, Alabama, who listened patiently to the testimony submitted at the trial and returned their verdict under oath.

  At least indirectly it was aimed at the people of Alabama, and the most charitable comment that can be fairly made is that the perpetrator has forfeited any claim he may have had to the respect of thoughtful citizens of this state.

  It is greatly to be hoped that the interests of the other defendants under the same charge will be in the hands of attorneys with some conception of the proprieties.

  Reading the Monroe Journal today, it is easy to forget that the paper served a community in which some 40 percent of the population was African American. Occasionally, and always buried in the middle of the paper, there would be a “Negro News” column listing births or deaths in the black community. Every so often the principal at the black school would write a letter to the editor asking white citizens for donations to the school, or expressing thanks for white support for various ventures. The most frequent appearance of African Americans in the Journal was on the front page in reports of auto accidents or black-on-black assaults or murders. On the sporadic occasion of black violence against whites, the coverage was extensive, as was white interest in the trial that followed.

  The casual racism of Jim Crow Alabama pervaded the Journal’s pages. Included among them were advertisements and announcements for blackface minstrel shows, performed at school auditoriums throughout the county by high school or church groups. In February 1935, for example, the Young Women’s Circle of the Methodist Missionary Society promised “plenty of laughs and fun” at the performance of a “Coon Town Wedding,” which included tap dancing and a “Negro quartette.” The sample ballot of the Democratic Party that the Journal printed included an emblem of a rooster below the banner “White Supremacy.” Also evident in the Journal’s pages was the racial paternalism common to southern whites of Lee’s social status. A July 1930 reprint of an article from a Virginia newspaper, for example, reported the death at age ninety of Evelina, a “much-loved colored mammy.” Born in slavery, she had refused emancipation, so profound was her love of “her white people.”

  A. C. LEE would be an inspiration for his daughter’s fiction not because he was ahead of his time, as the character of Atticus Finch of Mockingbird might imply, but rather because he was of his time and of his place, and yet still aspired to worthy ideals and noble values. Possessing no more than a middle school education, and with few resources for travel or other enlightening experiences, he was nevertheless a person of broad mind and high principle. There is plenty of evidence of those qualities in his editorials, particularly those he devoted to good government.

  It was his favorite subject, and likely the thing that motivated him to get into the newspaper business in the first place. On his editorial page he delivered treatises denouncing government officials who took private salaries along with their public ones, which Lee argued led to “a lowering of the standards of official fealty and integrity.” He criticized legislators who mingled too closely with lobbyists, and held forth on the proper relationship between corporations and government. The most consistent subtheme in this line of discourse was his condemnation of the political boss: Any politician who interpreted his duty as one of wringing spoils from government to be doled out to his constituents was on the road to bossism, Lee believed. Spoils delivered created debts to be repaid. It was through the collection of debts that politicians amassed personal power. Power invested in persons, rather than in the offices of government, weakened democracy as a whole. The slope was slippery. At the bottom was dictatorsh
ip.

  Lee was not alone in these fears in the 1930s. Anxiety about government spoils being used for political advantage was common on editorial pages throughout the nation at the time. The proliferation of New Deal agencies that combated the Great Depression by providing direct relief to suffering Americans created unprecedented opportunities for political abuse. The 1930s was also the era of the strongman. Dictatorships were on the rise around the globe, and, as we will see, Lee connected the problem directly to that of the political boss. Yet to a remarkable degree, Lee’s fears about political corruption coalesced in a decade-long string of commentary about one person in particular, that flamboyant figure of Louisiana lore, Huey Long.

  Lee was obsessed with Long. He first took note of him in 1931 when, as Louisiana’s governor, Long thrust himself to the forefront of southern politicians by calling for a regionwide cotton holiday program, a plan for southern farmers to take a year off from planting cotton in order to create scarcity and thereby raise its price. Lee liked the idea, and urged the Alabama governor to call a special session to discuss it. But the cotton holiday gained no traction among Alabama’s leaders, and Lee’s admiration for Long faded quickly. By the early 1930s, Long was becoming a national phenomenon. In 1930, he had run for the US Senate with two years left on his term as governor. When he won, he let his Senate seat sit empty for over a year until he finished his gubernatorial duties. Lee followed closely reports out of Louisiana of Long consolidating his power and ruthlessly dispensing with political enemies, running roughshod over local officials, legislators, and judges alike. Lee’s commentary was so frequent that by February 1935 he acknowledged that “[p]erhaps our readers may grow somewhat weary of our continued discussions of the unusual situation existing in our sister state of Louisiana.” But that didn’t stop Lee from writing more editorials on Long.