Atticus Finch

by Joseph Crespino

  At the beginning of February 1956, the Citizens’ Council chapter in Montgomery had expanded from just five hundred members the previous November to over six thousand. By the end of that month, membership was twelve thousand. Within two weeks of Autherine Lucy’s entry at Alabama, Council leadership announced the formation of a new statewide organization, the Alabama Association of Citizens’ Councils, headquartered in Montgomery and boasting a membership of forty thousand.

  The state association was dominated by the conservative leadership of the Alabama Black Belt. Their leader was Sam Engelhardt, a young, balding, bespectacled planter and state legislator from Shorter. A graduate of Washington and Lee, Engelhardt owned 6,500 acres of prime Black Belt farmland that had been in his mother’s family for four generations. His entry into politics in 1950 had been on a pledge to preserve white rule in his native Macon County, which had the highest ratio of blacks to whites of any county in the United States. It was also home to the Tuskegee Institute. Middle-class, college-educated African Americans in Tuskegee had been quietly mobilizing black political power for years.

  In Watchman, Harper Lee fictionalized Macon County as Abbott County, where, Atticus ominously reminds Jean Louise, the “population is almost three-fourths Negro” and “the voting population is almost half-and-half now, because of that big Normal School over there.” In a detail Harper Lee took directly from the newspapers, Atticus notes that “the county won’t keep a full board of registrars, because if the Negro vote edged out the white you’d have Negroes in every county office.” This was exactly what was happening in Macon County. As the New York Times reported in March 1956, the board of registrars there had met only once that year. Afterward, a board member had resigned and another refused to accept her appointment, denying the board the necessary quorum of two out of three members.

  Engelhardt and the Councils claimed to be the spokesmen for respectable resistance in Alabama. Engelhardt brought in the US senator from Mississippi James Eastland, a fellow planter, to address a Council rally in Montgomery in February 1956 that drew over ten thousand people. Eastland talked about coordinating a regionwide campaign that would take the South’s case to the nation. Above all, Engelhardt emphasized that resistance to the Brown decision would be through lawful, legal means. The day after a bomb exploded at Martin Luther King’s home in Montgomery in 1956, Engelhardt announced rewards totaling one thousand dollars for information leading to a conviction. It was a savvy move. The Councils were booming in Montgomery thanks to the bus boycott, and violent actions might have jeopardized the establishment support the Councils were enjoying in that city.

  Yet a rival faction in the Council movement was emerging that would have no such compunction. Their leader was a dark-haired charismatic former gas station attendant named Asa “Ace” Carter. During World War II, he had received training in radio broadcasting in a navy school in Colorado, expertise that he would put to use for a variety of far-right, racist causes in the postwar years. He worked for a time for the professional anti-Semite Gerald L. K. Smith, and moved to Birmingham in 1954 to become the spokesman and radio voice of the American States Rights Association. He was forced off the air in February 1955 for denouncing the National Conference of Christians and Jews, which actually had a strong following among influential citizens of Birmingham. Carter was quickly reassigned to head up the newly founded North Alabama Citizens’ Council, which drew much of its membership from the working-class, industrial neighborhoods in and around Birmingham.

  Whereas Engelhardt strove for the image of buttoned-down, respectable, lawful resistance, Carter’s group fought a shrill, red-faced culture war against the forces of racial integration. In Watchman, Harper Lee may have used Carter as the basis for the figure of Grady O’Hanlon, the firebrand extremist that Atticus introduces to the Maycomb Citizens’ Council. Carter regularly denounced southern elected officials as weak-willed accommodators. He called for a ban on rock-and-roll music in southern juke boxes, attacking it as an attempt by the NAACP to infiltrate the minds of southern whites with integrationist ideas. And he linked the North Alabama Council with Klan movements of old by requiring that “members believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ.” Jews should fight integration through other organizations, he said. Engelhardt’s group, by contrast, issued a statement declaring that it was “not interested in religious bias or prejudice, but is concerned only in maintaining segregation.”

  Most importantly, however, Asa Carter and the North Alabama Citizens’ Council were behind a number of high-profile incidents of racial violence. The most outlandish occurred in April 1956 when six white men attacked Nat King Cole, the famous African American singer and television star, during a performance in Birmingham. All six were members of the North Alabama Council, and Carter refused to repudiate their actions. Later that year Carter addressed one thousand people on the courthouse lawn in Clinton, Tennessee, during a protest over school integration. After Carter’s speech, a mob of whites blocked Main Street and attacked two cars with black passengers. Carter went on a speaking tour with John Kasper, a Council leader from Washington, DC, and instigator of much of the violence in Clinton. In 1957, Carter’s North Alabama Council became all but indistinguishable from the Birmingham-area original Ku Klux Klan of the Confederacy. Some of his followers would be responsible for a heinous Klan initiation rite in which an elderly black man was abducted and castrated. Carter himself was arrested in January 1957 for shooting two Klansmen during a dispute at a Klan meeting in Birmingham. Everyone present was robed and hooded, so Carter’s identity could not be definitely proven and the charges were eventually dropped.

  In November 1956, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation laws governing Montgomery city buses were unconstitutional. It was a signal victory for the Montgomery bus boycotters, and, in the long run, would be seen as a turning point in the modern civil rights movement. In the short term, however, the court’s decision enflamed the forces of white extremism in Alabama like nothing else before. Asa Carter called for “minute men” to enforce segregation on Birmingham buses. A civil rights leader described racial tension in that city as like “a lighted stick of dynamite with a short fuse.” White and black leaders both feared widespread violence on buses throughout Alabama between African Americans intent on testing the court’s decision and vigilante whites determined to maintain segregation. On Christmas Eve 1956, the night before Harper Lee received the Christmas envelope from her friends that allowed her to start drafting her novel, a shotgun blast tore through the front of Martin Luther King Jr.’s home in Montgomery. It came just hours after he had announced an accelerated campaign to secure black access to municipally owned recreational facilities in Montgomery. Six days later, while King addressed a mass meeting, a bomb exploded on the front porch of his home with his wife and daughter inside. White policemen and the Montgomery mayor hurried to King’s home, as did an angry crowd calling for retribution. One of the white policemen on the scene would later claim that he never would have made it out alive had it not been for King, who went out to the front porch to quiet the crowd, his hand raised high, evoking to many who saw him the scene of Christ calming the troubled waters.

  HARPER LEE WITNESSED the Council’s rise firsthand during her extended stay in Monroeville in 1956. On March 5, 228 men gathered at the courthouse to establish the Monroe County Citizens’ Council. Nothing happened in Monroe County that Short Millsap didn’t put his stamp on. He had inspected the Councils and found them useful, as shown by the fact that the group’s president was Harry Lazenby, the Monroe County tax assessor and one of Millsap’s chief henchmen. In one of her letters to New York friends, Nelle, in a humorous description of her family’s efforts opposing Short Millsap’s candidate for local elections, described Lazenby as “a singularly spineless creature all his life.”

  The purpose of the Council, as reported in the Monroe Journal, was to preserve the “legal, moral, and ethical separation of the races,” and “to engender and promote good feeling b
etween the colored and white people.” The friendly talk about good feelings was in part an answer to the strong skepticism about the organization already voiced on the Journal’s editorial page. Bill Stewart, the newspaperman who had bought the Journal from A. C. Lee in 1947, was the publisher of the paper in 1956. For months he had been hearing about how Monroe County needed a Citizens’ Council, and he addressed the rumors in a brief paragraph that ran in February 1956. “Certainly there is no hint of any type [sic] racial problem existing in our county,” he wrote, “and the formation of such a group could possibly create such an unwanted situation.” The paper repeated the warning of Governor Jim Folsom, that “nothing based on hate can exist for any length of time in a Christian Democracy.” Two weeks later, the Journal elaborated on its position. A Citizens’ Council in Monroe County would be both “hazardous and needless.” Recent racial “situations,” meaning primarily the Montgomery boycott and the Lucy controversy, had been “instigated by anti-South agitators,” the editorial held. “The majority of the people in our county and state should be credited with enough basic intelligence to keep their feet on the ground.”

  Black Monroe Countians objected to the formation of a Council as well. In March 1956, Reverend G. H. Brown, pastor of three black churches in the county, in Finchburg, Beatrice, and Monroeville, wrote a letter for publication in the Journal. “I can hardly see where an organization that adopts the program which it has adopted can rightly assume the position to work toward the end of peaceful relationship,” Brown said. A much better way forward, he suggested, would be an interracial committee to discuss community problems, a suggestion uniformly ignored by whites in Monroe County. Brown would go on to play a leading role in civil rights advances in Monroe in the 1970s and 1980s. He was one of five plaintiffs in a case challenging the county’s shift to at-large county superintendent districts, a common tactic used by southern counties after the 1965 Voting Rights Act to dilute black voting strength. He would later become the first African American countywide elected official in Monroe in the twentieth century.

  Despite these complaints, or perhaps because of them, whites in Monroe County flocked to the Councils. The first full meeting in late March drew 1,500 people to the county coliseum. Sam Engelhardt was there, one of four state senators present. He addressed the denizens of Monroe County like a time traveler who had come back from the future, warning them that what had happened in Macon County—Negroes demanding the vote, filing suit in federal court when denied it, planning a boycott of white merchants—would be visited on them soon enough. His loudest ovation came at the end of his remarks when he declared that “no Negro Congressman in the future will ride in Alabama’s Cadillac number one,” a reference to a recent incident in which Governor Jim Folsom had adhered to the custom of extending to visiting congressmen use of a state automobile—only in this instance, the visiting congressman was Adam Clayton Powell, the African American representative from Harlem. By May 1956, the Monroe Council claimed over seven hundred members. Over the next several months, many of the arch-segregationist luminaries would make their way to Monroeville, including Georgia Speaker of the House Roy Harris, the former State Department official Hugh G. Grant, and Mississippi judge Tom Brady.

  The Journal’s editorial opposition to the Councils died off quickly, suggesting that Bill Stewart and other Council opponents adopted the logic of Atticus in Watchman: If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. Harper Lee adorned her manuscript with real-life details to signal the distinction between the decent and the dangerous Citizens’ Councilors. “The Maycomb council’s not like the North Alabama and Tennessee kinds,” Atticus explains to Jean Louise, referencing Asa Carter’s organization and the violent school desegregation protests in Clinton, Tennessee, that he had helped incite. Atticus rejects violence or intimidation in favor of a strategic paternalism toward the black community, with an eye toward undermining the influence of civil rights groups like the NAACP. In a detail that Harper Lee might have borrowed from Selma in 1953, where the NAACP represented a young black man accused of an assault against a white woman and thereby stirred the local white community toward formal organization, Atticus agrees to defend the grandson of the Finch family’s maid after the young man runs over and kills a white man. “[I]sn’t it better for us to stand up with him in court than to have him fall into the wrong hands,” Atticus explains to his junior partner, Henry Clinton. The wrong hands, of course, would be the “NAACP-paid lawyers” who were “standing around like buzzards down here waiting for things like this to happen.” At the Council meeting that Jean Louise observes from the courthouse balcony, Atticus provides an ostentatiously curt introduction of the Asa Carter–esque Mr. O’Hanlon, the fiery main speaker. “I hope you noticed my brevity in introducing him,” Atticus says to Jean Louise later in the book. “Baby, Mr. O’Hanlon’s not, I’m happy to say, typical of the Maycomb County council membership.”

  The typical Maycomb County Citizens’ Councilor was someone like Henry Clinton, Atticus’s junior partner and Jean Louise’s would-be beau. Henry tells Jean Louise that the Maycomb Council was nothing more than “a protest to the Courts, it’s a sort of warning to the Negroes for them not to be in such a hurry.” Like Atticus, Henry participates in the Councils out of a sense of civic duty. It was the same sensibility that one of the real-life Council founders described, how the “highest type of citizenship” had to take the lead of the resistance movement, otherwise the wrong crowd would.

  Henry Clinton wasn’t from the higher social rungs, but he aspired to them. There was in the Council movement a class distinction, one that Harper Lee would have understood. Sam Engelhardt and the Council movement headquartered around Montgomery were intent on recruiting the planters, doctors, lawyers, bankers, and businessmen. Asa Carter saw the people that Engelhardt was signing up and felt that the common man was being left out. He went after the small farmers, mechanics, storekeepers, and small clerks. In Watchman, Henry Clinton came from the common folk who lived out in the country. He had a no-account father, and entered the orbit of the Finches only as the young boarder at a neighboring house. He lived in town so he could attend high school, his room paid for by a mother who worked long hours at a crossroads general store. He understood his precarious position in the Maycomb social structure. “[A]ny deviatin’ from the norm” and the folks in Maycomb would write him off. Yet Henry had gone to war, gotten a law degree, and won a plum job in Atticus Finch’s law office. The Citizens’ Councils, for him, represented a means of social advancement. “[M]en, especially men, must conform to certain demands of the community they live in simply so they can be of service to it,” Henry explains to Jean Louise. Being of service to the community was important to Henry Clinton, just as it was to Atticus.

  IN WATCHMAN, ATTICUS FINCH is not merely a town father performing his civic duty; he is also a shrewd lawyer with a jaded view of the role that the law and the courts have played in shaping the South’s political crisis. Harper Lee shows us this side of him when Jean Louise finally confronts Atticus directly about his Citizens’ Council membership. Like any good lawyer, Atticus, when called on to defend himself, instead goes on the attack: “Jean Louise, what was your first reaction to the Supreme Court decision?” We know from an early scene in the novel that Atticus is contemptuous of the decision; he refers to it as “the Supreme Court’s bid for immortality.” As it turns out, this is a “safe question” for Jean Louise to answer because she and her father share similar views about the court’s reasoning in Brown. It’s a surprising turn given not only Jean Louise’s fury at other aspects of the segregationist position, but also how confident she is in her political opinions in other parts of the novel. Yet when discussing Brown with Atticus, Jean Louise turns into a slump-shouldered, diffident little girl as Atticus smugly leads her through the particulars of the case.

  Jean Louise admits that upon reading the Brown decision she was so furious that she had to stop at the first bar she saw for a drink. “[T]here they were, tell
in’ us what to do again,” she complains. In trying to satisfy the Fourteenth Amendment, which provided for equal protection under the law, the court “rubbed out” the Tenth Amendment, as Jean Louise put it, which reserved to the states the powers not explicitly delegated to the federal government. “It’s only a small amendment, only one sentence long, but it seemed to be the one that meant the most, somehow,” she says to Atticus, her gee-whiz tone evocative of how Scout would speak of Boo Radley in Mockingbird. As Atticus goads her, Jean Louise stumbles through half-formed claims about the separation of powers. An activist Supreme Court, no matter how well-meaning, represents “something that could be truly dangerous to our set-up.” The federal government is to her “one small citizen,” mostly “dreary hallways and waiting around.” Yet, by the end of this impromptu lesson in constitutional theory, she manages a succinct summary of the danger of Brown for American democratic traditions: “[I]nstead of going about it through Congress and the state legislatures like we should, when we tried to do right we just made it easier for them to set up more hallways and more waiting.” Atticus sits up and laughs. “Sweet, you’re such a states’ rightist you make me a Roosevelt Liberal by comparison.”

  However ham-fisted the scene is, Harper Lee was evoking a substantial debate that the Brown decision raised about the law, the courts, and social change, one in which the segregationist position was more formidable than is often remembered. Brown prompted a storm of criticism, not merely for outlawing state-mandated segregation, but for how it outlawed it. The criticisms were not limited to southern segregationists. Writing in the New York Times the day after the decision, for example, James Reston, the paper’s chief Washington correspondent, called Brown a “sociological decision” based on “hearts and minds rather than laws.” Chief Justice Earl Warren’s unanimous majority opinion read “more like an expert paper on sociology than a Supreme Court opinion,” Reston wrote. In outlawing segregation in public schools, the court “rejected history, philosophy and custom as the major basis for its decision and accepted instead Justice Benjamin N. Cardoza’s test of contemporary social justice.”