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"Atticus's Vision of Ourselves"

“Atticus’s Vision of Ourselves”: Birmingham Pledge Foundation Lifetime Service Award to Harper Lee, 9/13/06
We gather here tonight to honor a person, a writer, her father, her family, and her novel. That is a bit more than I can manage in fifteen minutes, so I will stick with the novel. But it might help us all to remember that we are honoring both a person and a writer, and they are different. Persons have a right to be persons separate from being writers.
Every book, be it fiction or non-fiction, is to a considerable extent the projection of the writer’s vision and values. A work of fiction might seem an exception to this generalization, but I don’t think so. As writer/story teller Garrison Keillor once said, “Fifteen minutes after an accident, no two people can agree on the details of what happened. If it were not for the truth of fiction, there wouldn’t be any truth at all.”
So what truth have people around the world teased out of the pages of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD?
Racial Justice: Tom Robinson is a symbol of three centuries of apartheid and injustice toward Africans and African Americans. Don’t expect me to accomplish in a few minutes what ethicists, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, theologians, and historians have not been able to do in the past three centuries: untie the complex knot of racism in the world. Harper Lee could not figure it out. Nor could Atticus Finch, who asks in the novel: “Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don’t pretend to understand... .“ But there is a difference between Atticus and many of us. The inability to explain is not an excuse for spiritual amnesia. Just after his troubled query about racism, Atticus adds: “I just hope that Jem and Scout come to me for their answers instead of listening to the town.” Beyond our embedded love for our communities, Lee seems to be saying, is our obligation to follow our own internal ethical compass. “The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule,” Atticus explains, “is a person’s conscience.” And that is precisely why Atticus Finch emerges as such a profoundly important figure in American literature. If the jurors represent us at our cautious, timid, fearful, worst, Atticus is humanity at its best. And that is one reason the novel endures. In an age of anti-heroes--political and corporate corruption, excesses of all kinds by celebrities and athletes; a world populated by Madonna, Paris Hilton, Abramoff, Scanlon, Scrushy—Americans have lost their pool of real life heroes. So they seek them now in literature. And in Atticus Finch, they have found their favorite hero, the person more than any other they aspire to be like and they want to represent them at their best. Miss Maudie tries to explain all this to Jem: “I simply want to tell you that there are some men in this world who were born to do our unpleasant jobs for us. Your father’s one of them.”
Class: Although the year that the book was published, 1960, ushered in a new and violent age of civil rights upheaval in America and primed the reading public to understand the work as a race novel, I believe it is just as much about class. Lee describes two poor white families, the poor but proud Cunninghams and the poor but not proud Ewells. The Cunninghams are the deserving poor whom we can and should help. Scout explains the difference by telling her first grade teacher about her friend, young Walter Cunningham: “The Cunninghams never took anything they can’t pay back—no church baskets and no scrip stamps. They never took anything off anybody; they get along on what they have. They don’t have much, but they get along on it.” Not everyone in her family has Scout’s insight or her compassion. Her Aunt Alexandra thinks differently, in conjunction with the traditional social and class distinctions so deeply rooted in America: “The thing is [Scout] you can scrub Walter Cunningham until he shines, you can put him in shoes and a new suit, but he’ll never be like Jem. Besides, there’s a drinking streak in that family a mile wide. Finch women aren’t interested in that sort of people.”
Then there are the “white trailer trash” Ewells. They are the historic undeserving poor, regarded with disdain and contempt even by Maycomb’s blacks. They are the legendary “po’white trash” who fill Erskine Caldwell’s novels, not just economically indigent but also morally degenerate. In Act I of the play, Miss Maudie tells the audience: “Everyone in Maycomb knows what kind of people the Ewells are.” That line is always comforting to the audience because now it means they can sit back, relax, and enjoy the play. It is not about them. It is about the Ewells, all those undesirables who joined the KKK and lynch mobs. Trouble is that is not the way Lee sees the matter. Bob Ewell is no more her chief villain, the moral cripple in the story, than are the twelve men good and true who make up the jury. They could have acquitted Tom Robinson had they chosen to weigh the evidence instead of succumbing to Maycomb’s racial taboos. Though at the end of the play some audiences actually boo Robert E. Lee Ewell when he takes his bow on stage, the novel demands that we look for the villain inside ourselves. Ultimately it is all the good people of Maycomb who are silent in the face of injustice who murder Tom Robinson.
Differences: One of the most important themes of the novel for our time is tolerance of people unlike ourselves. Boo Radley may be a subtheme to some, but not to homosexuals, who often see themselves in the character, locked behind four walls by people who fear anyone who is different. Not to private people who are constantly being psychoanalyzed by Type A personalities: are they afraid of people? Are they afraid of failure? Are they painfully shy? Are they mentally deficient? Do they have dark secrets? Are they Muslims? Jews? Pentecostals? Evolutionists? In some places, perhaps even Fundamentalistic Baptists? Of all people who are different for any reason, Atticus reminds his children: “You never understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
Community: At the beginning of the novel, Jem and Scout debate when the story began. Jem insists it began when their new friend Dill came into their lives and excited curiosity about Boo Radley. Scout disagrees, believing the story began when their ancestors chose to settle in Maycomb County. Maycomb, Alabama is a specific name but not a specific place. In fact many readers of the book insist it is a story about their town and people who live in it. They can and do give the characters the names of local people. Having lived in Sheffield, Gadsden, Anniston, and Dothan while growing up, I can tell you the novel could have been set in any of those places. As in Maycomb, every day lasted 24 hours but seemed much longer. But each one of those days was filled with exceptional people and extraordinary events that turns all of us Scouts into, Jean Louises when we grow up. The point is that what happened in Maycomb could have happened in Fort Payne, Alberville, Demopolis, Brewton, Fairhope, and all the places in between. What happened in Maycomb could have happened anywhere. What happened in Maycomb did happen everywhere. To Jews in Prague; to homosexuals in Berlin; to Gypsies in Romania, Pentecostals in Russia, Muslims in Serbia. And it happened to Oakies and Arkies in California’s Imperial Valley in the 1930s, to Appalachian whites in Detroit in the 1940s, and to people from Birmingham moving to New York City and Los Angeles in the 1960s. It happened to all people everywhere who talk funny, look strange, have a different color skin, worship God differently or not at all, people who stay in houses and refuse to come out and conform to our expectations or allow us to stare at them. It happens to the different, the strange, the other. That is the reason the novel stills sells nearly a million copies a year nearly half a century after publication: because it continues to ring true of the human experience. That is why it is required reading in so many Irish, British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, Austrian, Dutch, Czech, and German schools, why it has been translated into some 40 languages: because the story is a story of the human experience, not just the story of what happened in Maycomb, Alabama.
The endurance of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD resides also in the intense half century debate we have had in American education about moral values. Should public schools teach values? If so, what values? Whose values? Actually hundreds of thousands of American teachers resolved that debate a long time ago. They decided to teach Harper Lee’s values. Or is it Atticus Finchs values? At any rate, they teach the moral values embedded in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. And at our best, I like to think they teach our values, core Judaic-Christian, American, democratic values: tolerance, kindness, civility, charity, justice, the courage to face down a community or a family when they are wrong and the compassion to love them despite their flaws. Incidentally, I am not telling you anything you don’t know already, How do I know that? Because there was a survey of English teachers in 1989 to determine what fiction they most frequently assigned to their students. In Catholic schools TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD was the 4th most frequently assigned book. In public schools the novel ranked 5th, in private schools, 7th. An estimated three out of four American high school students read the novel, ranking Lee behind only William Shakespeare, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain. A 1991 Library of Congress survey of 5,000 patrons asked them what book had made the biggest difference in their lives. They listed TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD second only to the Bible. In 1991 American librarians voted the book the best novel of the Twentieth Century. That same year the American Film Institute rated the film version of the novel as the 34th best film ever made; and four years later, in 2003, they chose Atticus Finch as the greatest hero of American cinema. Also in 1999 TV GUIDE rated the movie 5th among its top 50 films. The Library of Congress also claims that the novel is the most popular selection for city-wide literature programs that ask residents to read a common novel during a year as the basis for a conversation about community values.
In one of those fine moments of irony for which Alabama is renowned, a novel written by a woman from Monroeville on the edge of the state’s infamous Black Belt has become the primary literary instrument worldwide for teaching values of racial justice and tolerance for people different from ourselves, and the necessity for moral courage in the face of community prejudice and ostracism. Don’t you just love it?
Wayne Flynt, Distinguished University Professor, Auburn University

- Dr. Wayne Flynt (09/14/2006)

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How has To Kill A Mockingbird affected you?

Purchase tickets now to Lifetime Achievement Awards
at Alys Stephens Center

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view. Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” – Atticus Finch

In 1960, Harper Lee wrote a coming-of-age story about innocence and injustice, friendship and intolerance, good and evil in the Deep South. Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird has been read by millions, studied in classrooms, and adapted into numerous stage productions and an Academy Award-winning film.

Perhaps most importantly of all its achievements, the story has taught each person it has touched a lesson in the importance of racial harmony. To honor this, The Birmingham Pledge will give its annual Lifetime Achievement Award to Harper Lee on September 13 at the Alys Stephens Center.

Tell us how To Kill a Mockingbird has affected you. Send us an essay of 300 words or less describing how Lee’s story has influenced your thoughts, actions, your philosophy on life or how you treat others. The Birmingham Pledge will post select essays on this website and will present them to Harper Lee along with her award. Send your essay to kitty@birminghampledge.org. Include your name, email and daytime phone number. Three essayists will be selected at random to receive two free tickets each to the September 13 event honoring Harper Lee. The deadline for essays is Friday, September 8, and lucky recipients will be notified by September 10.

Tickets are available to the general public. To purchase tickets, call the Alys Stephens Center at (205) 975-ARTS or toll-free at 1-877-ART-TIKS. Tickets may also be purchased by faxing the Alys Stephens Center at (205) 975-2829 or visiting http://www.alysstephens.org. We hope to see you there!

- Birmingham Pledge (08/30/2006)

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To Kill A Mockingbird Author Harper Lee to Receive the Birmingham Pledge Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award

The Birmingham Pledge Foundation announced that it will present its 2006 Lifetime Achievement Award to Nelle Harper Lee, author of the American literary classic, To Kill a Mockingbird. Ms. Lee, a native of Monroeville, Alabama, will receive the award in Birmingham during the Eighth Annual National Birmingham Pledge Week, September 10-16.

The ceremony will be held at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, September 13th, at the Alys Robinson Stephens Performing Arts Center in Birmingham. The ceremony will feature Alabama historian and social activist Dr. Wayne Flynt, whose research interests have encompassed political history, poverty and religion in the South. Flynt, Professor Emeritus at Auburn University, is the author of 11 books, including the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Poor but Proud: Alabama’s Poor Whites.

Organized by the Birmingham Pledge Foundation, Birmingham Pledge Week draws its leaders and participants from across local business, youth, and faith communities. Co-chairs of 2006 Birmingham Pledge Week are Ms. Cathy O. Friedman, City Paper Company and community volunteer, and the Honorable Houston Brown, Circuit Judge, 10th Judicial Circuit, Birmingham.

James E. Rotch, Chairman of the Birmingham Pledge Foundation, will offer opening remarks. Rotch authored the Birmingham Pledge in 1997 as a personal commitment to recognize the importance of every individual, regardless of race or color. Since its inception, tens of thousands of people throughout the world have signed this personal commitment.

In addition, the event will highlight the Birmingham Pledge Week Teen Conference that brings together at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute more than 100 young people from thirty high schools in the Birmingham area for a full day of workshops and discussion on current issues of race and world affairs. The Teen Conference is a part of Birmingham's Pledge Week—a celebration of Birmingham's civil rights history and the progress that continues to be made in our city. This 2006 conference theme is: “9/11: Five Years Later….where are we now?”

A limited number of reserved seats to the 2006 Lifetime Achievement Award Ceremony honoring Nelle Harper Lee went on sale Wednesday, August 23rd. Ticket prices are $50, $35 and $25. The public may order tickets by calling the Alys Stephens Center at (205) 975-ARTS or toll-free at 1-877-ART- TIKS. Tickets may also be purchased by faxing the Alys Stephens Center at (205) 975-2829 or visiting www.alysstephens.org.

- Kelly Griffin (08/30/2006)

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