Atticus Finch Confronted What the South Couldnt
Zcalo Public Square is a magazine of ideas from Arizona State University Knowledge Enterprise. While there are many noble characters in the pantheon of Southern fiction, few have the iconic standing of Harper Lee's Atticus Finch. Since the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird more than 50 years ago, this fictional character has become profoundly real to many Southerners, and not just because of the way Gregory Peck brought him to life on film. For former United Nations ambassador and Georgia native Andrew Young, Atticus Finch represented "a generation of intelligent white lawyers who eventually, in the '50s and '60s, became the federal judges who changed the South." Tennessee native and journalist Jon Meacham once said, "We all like to think Atticus Finch was our father or grandfather.", Now Harper Lee's Go Set A Watchman, which is set some 20 years after Mockingbird, presents a less than noble Atticus, one you may not want to think of as your father or grandfather. The man who performed the valiant job of defending a black man falsely accused of rape in Mockingbird is now, in the pages of Watchman, attending Ku Klux Klan meetings, joining the White Citizen's Council, and advocating eugenics. This new depiction of Atticus will certainly change the legacy of a seminal figure in Southern literature. The South came to idolize Atticus Finch because he confronted the issue of race in a way that white Southerner liberals and moderates in the '60s wish they could have had they lived back in '30s. At the same time, Atticus gave them permission to stand up against the gross inequities of Jim Crow laws, which were still in effect when the book was first published.