Atticus Finch

by Joseph Crespino

  IN HIS INAUGURAL address, George Wallace made his bid to define what he called “the southern spirit… the southern philosophy.” Harper Lee had done something very similar in Mockingbird. Atticus was the embodiment of the spirit and philosophy of her South. And an amped-up, spit-shined, cinematized version of it was playing in movie houses throughout the nation, and soon would be playing throughout the world.

  Mockingbird would eventually be celebrated as a Hollywood classic, but some of the early reviews in national weeklies were not so kind. The New Republic described the film as a “soft-caramel” version of Intruder in the Dust. The New Yorker noted the story’s conflict between Atticus’s high-minded appeals to the rule of law and his complicity in Heck Tate’s ruse that saved Boo Radley from being tried for the murder of Bob Ewell: “The moral of this can only be that while ignorant rednecks musn’t take the law into their own hands, it’s all right for nice people to do so.” Time’s criticisms were sharper still, dismissing the movie’s “side-porch sociology” as “fatuous” and Peck’s performance as a weak attempt at being “the Abe Lincoln of Alabama.” Newsweek described Peck playing Atticus in a “dreamy, almost ectoplasmic way. He is careful never to exist too much.” The review captured well the challenge of the filmmakers in reconciling the novel’s sentimental portrait of small town life with the injustice of Tom Robinson’s conviction: “The narrator’s voice returns at the end, full of warmth and love—for Atticus, Maycomb, and the South—but we do not pay her the same kind of attention any more. We have seen that outrageous trial, and we can no longer share the warmth of her love.”

  There were positive reviews, too. The Baltimore Sun called Peck “superb,” his performance was, “without question, the greatest thing he has ever done.” The Boston Globe believed that if Peck didn’t win the best actor award, “then Hollywood is doing him an injustice.” Variety thought Peck’s role was “especially challenging… requiring him to conceal his natural physical attractiveness yet project through a veneer of civilized restraint and resigned, rational compromise the fires of social indignation and humanitarian concern that burn within the character.”

  Reviewers in southern newspapers greeted the movie with an almost palpable sigh of relief. “[H]ere at last is the real South,” Mildred Williams wrote in the Richmond News Leader. She hoped that the film would “help our neighbors to the North to understand us and our problems.” In the Atlanta Constitution, Marjory Rutherford praised the film as “an understated, honest and compassionate story,” one “not likely to offend any but the most bigoted viewers.” The Birmingham News reviewer admitted having approached the film warily, mindful of “the ‘slant’ Hollywood gives pictures dealing with race.” Yet she was delighted to see the film’s treatment of controversial issues. Writing in the Alabama Journal, published in Montgomery, Arch McKay Jr. praised the filmmakers for the “dignity and integrity” with which they handled the courtroom scene. “There is no attempt to press any issue to the front other than the issue of justice for which the trial is being held,” he wrote. “True, some glaring errors of the social system are shown in the film, but is it the fault of the film for showing them or the system for having them?”

  In her history and memoir of the Birmingham civil rights movement, Diane McWhorter, a Birmingham native, recalled the powerful emotions the film stirred for her and her fellow fifth graders. McWhorter was actually a classmate of Mary Badham’s at a private girls’ school in Mountain Brook, the wealthy white suburb. She and her classmates joined Badham for a sneak preview of the movie the night before the official debut. She recalled how the film brought her and her friends “face to face with the central racial preoccupation of the southern white psyche, the dynamics that justified and ennobled Our Way of Life: the rape of a white woman by a black man.” She remembered how she and the other girls couldn’t understand how the jury could fail to acquit Tom Robinson, “especially since his lawyer was Gregory Peck.” They were not yet schooled in the “meaning of southern justice,” McWhorter observed. Her experience is a reminder of how many Americans who saw the film before reading the book first encountered Atticus—not as Harper Lee imagined him, as a rough proxy for her conservative, south Alabama father, but as Hollywood’s handsome, familiar leading man.

  McWhorter tried hard to hold back her tears that night but couldn’t. She and her fellow students shared a secret bond, she recalled—the “racial guilt… in rooting for a Negro man”—one they acknowledged to each other by reciting the lines from Scout’s innocent address to Mr. Cunningham outside the Maycomb Jail. McWhorter returned to the Saturday matinee showing with friends to “weep clandestinely.” They kept up the ritual for several weeks, until their mothers forbade them from going downtown. It was too dangerous given the civil rights marches that had become regular occurrences in the spring of 1963.

  Nominated for eight Academy Awards, Mockingbird took home three: Henry Bumstead, Alexander Golitzen, and Oliver Emert won for Best Art Direction; Horton Foote won for Best Adapted Screenplay; and Gregory Peck prevailed in a crowded Best Actor field that included Jack Lemmon in Days of Wine and Roses, Burt Lancaster in Birdman of Alcatraz, and Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. As Sophia Loren read out his name, Peck clutched A. C. Lee’s pocket watch, a memento Harper Lee had given him after her father’s death.

  In a fitting twist of fate, the award for Best Supporting Actor went to Ed Begley for his portrayal of Boss Finley, a crass, corrupt political kingpin in Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth. It was the Boss Finleys of southern politics to whom A. C. Lee had taken such exception on his editorial page. Among the first and the most profound lessons that the young Nelle Harper had learned from her father was the importance of standing up to the demagogue, of speaking out for honesty and decency in public life. If A. C. hadn’t done it at all times on all issues, he had done it enough to inspire his daughter to create a character that would outlive them both as a model of the civic ideal.

  The juxtaposition of the virtuous and the corrupt in southern politics, of Atticus and Boss Finley, had long fascinated Harper Lee. And if the Academy Awards were a reliable cultural barometer, it also fascinated a great number of her fellow Americans in 1963, that most fateful of all years in the southern civil rights movement. But while movie stars handed out their awards in Hollywood, back in Alabama, in Birmingham, the civil rights protests that had so alarmed the mothers of Mountain Brook had raised a critical question about white Americans’ role in the unfinished struggle for freedom and justice in the South: Would decency be enough?

  Chapter 6

  Letter from Maycomb Jail

  Hundreds of people jammed the sidewalks of downtown Birmingham, spilling out into the street, blocking traffic. A massive klieg light lit up the night sky. Reporters and photographers jockeyed to get close to the action. April 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, would come to be remembered as a turning point in American history. The sight of police dogs and high-powered fire hoses turned on nonviolent civil rights protestors shocked the nation, setting off a chain of events that led to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the most far-reaching civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. Yet before there were protests, there was a party.

  It was the north Alabama premiere of To Kill a Mockingbird. The throngs were waiting to catch a glimpse of Mary Badham and Phillip Alford, the hometown heroes who had made good in Hollywood. On a flat-bed truck outside the Melba Theater, the child actors fielded questions from the press. Behind them, the theater marquee spelled out their names in two-foot-high letters. Badham wore a pale yellow party dress with white gloves and a black headband; the next day’s papers described Alford as handsome, poised, and gallant. An official awarded them keys to the city. The president of the Birmingham Junior Chamber of Commerce presented them with a plaque.

  The Junior Chamber had led the campaign to bring Mockingbird to Birmingham after local theater owners had refused to show it, scared off by the film’s depiction of southern injustice. Yet get
ting Atticus in front of local audiences was only one of the triumphs in recent months for Birmingham’s young, white professional leaders. The most significant had taken place the night before Mockingbird’s premiere.

  Albert Boutwell, the former Alabama lieutenant governor and, by Birmingham standards, a racial moderate, won a decisive victory in a bitterly fought campaign for mayor against Eugene “Bull” Connor, Birmingham’s arch-segregationist public safety commissioner. This is what put many people in Birmingham in the mood for a party. City papers hailed it as a watershed moment in Birmingham’s history. Connor had ruled Birmingham with an iron fist for nearly three decades. Though his reign had been briefly interrupted by a scandal in the early 1950s when a reporter discovered him in a hotel room with his secretary, the rise of the militant segregationist movement a few years later gave Connor a political lifeline. He capitalized on it with an ugly race-baiting campaign in 1956. With contacts that reached deep into the fetid corners of white racist extremism, Connor was more responsible than anyone for making Birmingham the South’s most recalcitrant big city.

  Connor’s defeat was a coup for Birmingham’s moderate business leaders, although the fact that Boutwell would be tapped as the reform candidate says much about how bad things had gotten in the city. As a state senator, he had been the brains behind the Freedom of Choice legislation that had given segregationists an end run around the Brown decision. A good friend of the Citizens’ Council, he had delivered the Council-sponsored radio address that denounced the 1957 Civil Rights Act as “monstrous legislation.” He was the kind of politician that Dick Gregory, the comedian and civil rights activist, had in mind when he joked: “You know the definition of a Southern moderate? That’s a cat that’ll lynch you from a low tree.” But reformers in the city knew him as a segregationist who could still be swayed by a smart argument, and in the early 1960s that distinguished him among Alabama’s political class. The smart argument by that time was that segregation was doomed, and the best thing to do was get out in front in managing its demise.

  The mayor’s race had come about only after a narrowly won referendum that had changed city government in Birmingham from a commissioner to a mayor-council system, which had been another, earlier victory for the city’s young white progressives. Prominent among them were the lawyers David Vann, a future mayor of Birmingham, and Charles Morgan, Birmingham’s real-life Atticus Finch—that is, if Atticus’s law practice had been ruined and he’d been forced to leave Alabama. That’s what happened to Morgan after he gave a speech and a follow-up editorial in the New York Times publicly acknowledging white Birmingham’s collective guilt in the September 1963 church bombing that killed four African American girls. Vann, Morgan, and the other young Turks believed that with Connor’s ouster, Birmingham had turned a corner.

  Not everyone was convinced. A vanguard within Birmingham’s black community, led by the intrepid and tempestuous civil rights leader Fred Shuttlesworth, had been planning a direct-action campaign for months. Bull Connor had closed down city parks, and promises by downtown merchants to desegregate stores and open jobs for blacks had led to no real action. Shuttlesworth, along with Martin Luther King Jr. and several others, had been a founding member of the Atlanta-based Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and he had been urging King to come to Birmingham. The SCLC needed a successful protest, Shuttlesworth knew. The previous year, their campaign in Albany, Georgia, had been widely condemned as a failure. The Albany police chief, Laurie Pritchett, had met peaceful protest with peaceful policing, filling the jails in Albany and surrounding areas, and depriving King of the dramatic confrontations needed to draw sympathy and support for the cause. King signed off on plans for a Birmingham campaign to start in early 1963, yet the runoff in the mayoral election prompted him to put things on hold. Protests in the midst of a political campaign would only fuel white reaction and help Bull Connor in the race.

  The night after Boutwell’s victory—the same night as Mockingbird’s premiere—King addressed the first mass meeting of the Birmingham campaign. Earlier that day, twenty protestors had been arrested during sit-ins at lunch counters downtown. King coached the crowd in nonviolent tactics, and vowed to stay in Birmingham until the movement’s demands were met.

  It is easy to forget how few people, white or black, welcomed King’s presence in Birmingham. Shuttlesworth, King’s main contact, was hardly the spokesman for a united black Birmingham. He didn’t live in the city any longer, having left for a pastorate in Cincinnati two years earlier. Many of Birmingham’s black leaders believed that negotiations with whites still held promise, and that direct action would only poison the well of good feeling after Boutwell’s election. The young white business and professional leaders who had engineered Bull Connor’s ouster were flabbergasted that King would begin a campaign the very day after their labors had finally born fruit. In Washington, Burke Marshall, head of the civil rights division at the Justice Department, personally called the SCLC command post in Birmingham to convey his opinion, one shared by his boss Robert Kennedy, that King should forgo protests and give Boutwell’s new administration a chance. In the early weeks of the campaign, national publications—Time, Newsweek, the Washington Post—weighed in with their skepticism, both about the timing of the protests and the motivations of the protestors.

  Schoolchildren today are shown the famous photo of one of Bull Connor’s police dogs attacking a young black protestor—which reportedly made President Kennedy sick to his stomach when he saw it—and taught how this and other horrible images finally turned American public opinion against Jim Crow. They did, but not immediately. In April, in both local and national papers, incidents of dogs attacking marchers were described in ways that would have led readers to sympathize with the Birmingham police. The Birmingham News reported that a police dog had attacked a protestor only after the man had flashed a pipe at the dog. An article in the New York Times claimed that a police dog had pinned one protestor to the ground after the man had slashed at the dog with a large knife.

  What turned the tide in King’s favor was civil rights leaders’ decision in late April to use children as marchers. Before that, about 350 demonstrators had been arrested and the ranks of volunteers from the black community were depleted. It looked like Birmingham would be another Albany. But the addition of hundreds of young protestors filled the jails. And when that happened, Bull Connor finally showed himself to be the hothead that everyone had known he was. He set loose his officers with firehoses and police dogs and thoroughly disgraced his city for all the world to see. King, Shuttlesworth, and the other movement leaders finally got what they had come for.

  Before that point, on April 12, 1963, Good Friday, eight of Alabama’s most prominent white religious leaders published an open letter critical of the protests. Among them were bishops of the Methodist and Episcopal churches, the moderator of the Synod of the Alabama Presbyterian Church in the United States, an auxiliary bishop of the Catholic Church, the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Birmingham, and the rabbi of Birmingham’s Temple Emanu-El. Albert Boutwell’s election had brought “days of new hope,” the men wrote, and “extreme measures” like direct-action protest were “unwise and untimely.” They argued that the protests were “directed and led in part by outsiders,” evoking not only King but Shuttlesworth, too, and called for direct negotiations with city leaders, which, they pointed out, a number of local black leaders had called for. Hatred and violence could not be tolerated, the men wrote, but neither should protests that incite others to hatred and violence, “however technically peaceful those actions may be.”

  The ministers’ letter was a follow-up to one they had published three months earlier, only two days after Governor Wallace’s inflammatory inaugural speech. That initial letter would have been remarkable if for no other reason than the diversity of its authors. The fact that Methodists and Baptists—the two largest but in most ways parochial of southern denominations—would join in a statement with a Catho
lic, much less a rabbi, was unheard of in Alabama.

  Their January letter explicitly denounced the militant segregationists, the same forces that had prompted Harper Lee to recalibrate the moral and political aims of her fiction. Recent court decisions would soon force the desegregation of some schools and colleges in Alabama. “[D]efiance is neither the right answer nor the solution,” they wrote. With Wallace’s bellicose and intransigent rhetoric still ringing in Alabamans’ ears, they warned that “rebellious statements can lead only to violence, discord, confusion and disgrace for our beloved state.” They reminded their followers that the “American way of life” depended on “obedience to the decisions of courts of competent jurisdiction,” and they reaffirmed the importance of protecting freedom of speech. Sounding a universalist theme of which Martin Luther King himself was fond, they advised that “no person’s freedom is safe unless every person’s freedom is equally protected.”

  The January statement was titled “An Appeal for Law and Order and Common Sense.” That phrase, “law and order,” had often been used as a bludgeon against progressive advocates of reform. And later in the decade, George Wallace would trumpet it nationally, paving the way for its utilization by right-wing politicians up to the present day. Yet it should not be dismissed as merely the dog whistle of reactionaries. In earlier decades in southern history, decent white people had used it as a defense against the reactionaries themselves. That was how these ministers used it here, as an admonition to the demagogues sowing hatred and division. The appeal to law and order was part of a long and often tragic struggle to turn the legal, political, and judicial system in the South into something more than a formalized proxy for mob rule. This is what A. C. Lee had tried to do in Monroe County in the 1920s and 1930s. It was of a piece with what the young businessmen and lawyers in Birmingham—white leaders who by 1963 had accepted the necessity of desegregation—tried to do in ousting Bull Connor. It was part of a southern tradition that had arisen in opposition to the detestable and appalling ones—the lynchings and political buffoonery—a tradition of civic-minded, conscientious, conservative men defending the rule of law. Harper Lee knew it, and cherished it, and had worked so hard to try to capture it in the figure of Atticus Finch.