Why Should We Celebrate the 50th Anniversary of To Kill A Mockingbird?

Taunya Lovell Banks

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel To Kill A Mockingbird. Most law students know about its protagonist, Atticus Finch, having read the novel or seen the sanitized film version released in 1962. Finch, the widower and small-town Alabama lawyer, remains an icon in the minds of law students, lawyers and the general public. Thus it came as no surprise that my Law & Literature seminar students after reading several fictional and non-fictional stories about flawed lawyers suggested I add Lee’s book to next year’s list of readings to provide a positive counter image.

In the decade since I started teaching the seminar my students never read about Atticus Finch. This was a conscious decision because I, and a few other people, do not consider Finch especially heroic. He was a decent man practicing law in an unjust society who did his job, nothing more. Several years ago in writing about the film adaptation of the book I said: “Finch, by putting on an earnest defense in Tom Robinson’s case, was breaking the rules of his racially segregated society . . . . [and] perhaps this is what resonates with many people who tout [him] as the ideal lawyer.”[1]

In the early 1990s legal ethics scholar Monroe Freedman complained that Finch was not a good moral example for contemporary lawyers because, among other things, he did not volunteer to take the case.[2] He was appointed by the local judge to represent Robinson and theoretically could not refuse. At times Finch even comes across as an apologist. When his children ask about the Ku Klux Klan, he says it is a “political organization more than anything.” He conceals from them the awful truth about that organization’s use of violence and intimidation to deny black Americans basic civil rights.

Freedman was attacked by other lawyers for characterizing Finch as an unworthy moral and ethical legal role model. Subsequently he wrote:

We’re left with the immortal Atticus Finch, a lawyer who didn’t do pro bono work, who justified the actions of an attempted murderer, and who found little fault with the Ku Klux Klan. Finch may live on as a mythical figure, but we should ask why some members of the legal profession find him worthy of deification and why they are so vociferous in his defense.[3]

In reading about planned celebrations of To Kill A Mockingbird’s 50^th anniversary it seems clear that Finch’s iconic status remains largely untarnished almost two decades later.[4] Since Freedman only a few legal scholars have questioned Finch’s personification as the ideal heroic lawyer.[5] Thus next year I plan to teach To Kill A Mockingbird. I will ask my Law & Literature students to evaluate Finch’s representation of Tom Robinson from three perspectives: Alabama in the 1930s, the book’s setting, Alabama in 1960, its publication date and Alabama fifty years later. If they decide Finch acted ethically and heroically viewing him from the perspective of each era then perhaps he merits his immortal status. Although I continue to have serious doubts about his iconic statute, perhaps I can be persuaded to join the bandwagon.

---

[1]http://digitalcommons.law.umaryland.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1444&context=fac_pubs

[2] Monroe Freedman, “Atticus Finch, Esq., R.I. P.” , 14 Legal Times 20 (Feb. 24, 1992).

[3] Monroe Freedman, Finch: The Lawyer Methologized, 4 Legal Times. 25 (May,18,1992). 20. Id. 21.

[4] For a list of recent articles extolling Finch’s virtues see Renee Newman Knake, Beyond Atticus Finch: Lessons on Ethics and Morality from Lawyers and Judges in Postcolonial Literature, 32 J. of Legal Profession n. 35 (2008).

[5] For more critical assessment of Atticus Finch see, Steven Lubet, Reconstructing Atticus Finch, 97 MICH. L. REV. 1339 (1999) and W. Bradley Wendel, Introduction, Our Love Hate Relationship with Heroic Lawyers, 13 WIDENER L.J. 1 (2003).

Comments

[Dexter Patmon]

True story: This morning, I spied an earwig on the kitchen counter. Rather than squash it, I scooped it up, carried it outside, dropped it on the ground, and watched it scurry away. A heroic gesture on my part. Or so, I assume, the earwig will recount in song and epic poem.

Many times have I squashed a bug without incurring feelings of remorse. This morning, I simply felt no inclination to inflict capital punishment on a particular bug at a particular time for the particular crime of trespassing.

What, I ask, makes a deed heroic and its doer a hero? What are the particulars?

[Fabrisse]

I am not an attorney, and I haven't read the book in many years. However, I can tell you why I think of Atticus Finch as an heroic lawyer. Once he is assigned the case, he defends the man thoroughly and to the very best of his ability in spite of subtle and overt pressures not to do so. Should he have volunteered? Maybe. But in that town, the fact of volunteering might have prejudiced others who would later be on the jury against his defense of the man.

My father grew up in the segregated South, on the white side, he speaks of the little rebellions against the status quo that his father, a minister, was able to make in roughly the same time frame. Our black cousins have talked to me about the little humiliations endured growing up under Jim Crow. Those little rebellions of people like Atticus Finch helped change some minds -- the Cunninghams held out on the jury, for example.

Would I like to read of big heroes who did great things? Yes, of course, but sometimes the small heroisms need to be celebrated too.