[Ed. Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Judge Milt Hirsch’s “Constitutional Calendar.” Judge Hirsch sits in the criminal division of the 11th Judicial Circuit Court in Miami-Dade, Florida. Before being elected to the bench, he was a board member of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and president of FACDL Miami.]
If you’re a judge or lawyer about my age – and yes, there are still a few people and several sequoia trees that are about my age – I know exactly why you decided to become a lawyer. In fact, if you’re about my age, I know exactly when you decided to become a lawyer.
It was on a Saturday night. Mom and Dad had agreed, not without misgivings, that you were old enough to stay home without a babysitter. They left you on the livingroom couch, staring at the grainy black-and-white images radiating from the only TV in the house. You were watching a movie called To Kill a Mockingbird.
Atticus Finch was a lawyer called upon to represent a factually innocent Black man charged with the rape of a White woman in a small town in the Depression-era South. The verdict, as to which fact and law were irrelevant, was a foregone conclusion. But like every good trial lawyer, Atticus Finch persuaded himself that this time – this time – his neighbors who made up the jury would rise above rigid custom and unbending prejudice, and do what was right. Like every good trial lawyer, Atticus Finch persuaded himself. But he persuaded no one else.
So there you saw him, standing in the well of the court, alone, saddened, sagging. The judge had left, the court personnel had left, the jury and the onlookers had left. The courtroom appeared empty.
Then the camera pulled back, and you saw that the courtroom was not empty. The mezzanine gallery – the “colored gallery” – was as full as it could be. And as Atticus Finch turned to walk out of the courtroom, those seated in the colored gallery offered him the only, and the most perfect, tribute they could offer: They stood.
The camera swept to the right, to the end of gallery. There sitting in the lap of an avuncular old Black man was a little White girl: Jean Louise Finch, known as Scout, Atticus’s daughter and the narrator of the movie. She turned to the old man in whose lap she sat, her face a question mark.
He spoke, answering her unspoken question. “Stand up, Miss Jean Louise,” he said. “Your father’s passing by.”
If you’re about my age that’s exactly when you decided to become a lawyer.
Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird was published on July 11, 1960. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The movie made from it – the one you watched on the livingroom couch that Saturday night – won the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay, and a host of other awards. But those aren’t the only forms of recognition that To Kill a Mockingbird has earned.
In 1977 it was objected to and temporarily banned in Eden Valley, Minnesota, for “vulgar language.” In 1980 it was challenged in the Vernon-Verona Sherrill, New York, School District as having “filthy” and “trashy” content. In 1981 Black parents in Warren, Indiana, objected to the book, describing it as “institutionalized racism under the guise of good literature.” In 1984 the novel was challenged in the Waukegan, Illinois, School District for its use of racial slurs. Same thing in 1985 in Kansas City. And in the Casa Grande, Arizona, Elementary School District.
And in 1995 in Santa Cruz, California. And in Caddo Parish, Louisiana.
In 1996 the book was banned in Lindale, Texas for content that “conflicted with the values of the community.” Objections continued into the 21st century in Georgia, Oklahoma, Illinois, North Carolina, Tennessee, and New Jersey.
The novel was banned in St. Edmund Campion Secondary School in Brampton, Ontario, in 2009. The good news – the closest thing to good news – is that in 2013, the Plaquemines Parish School Board in Belle Chasse, Louisiana, lifted a 12-year ban.
The school board in Biloxi, Mississippi, at one point removed To Kill a Mockingbird from the eighth-grade curriculum. The school board said that the book “makes people uncomfortable.”
Of all the reasons offered for banning To Kill a Mockingbird, the one offered by the Biloxi School Board is the most candid, the most revealing, and the most important. The book “makes people uncomfortable.” And that, it seems to me, is the point.
To Kill a Mockingbird makes people uncomfortable because it describes in a matter-of-fact manner the caste system enforced by White people against Black people in the small-town South of the Depression. If lawyers and judges who read the novel, or saw the movie, were made to feel uncomfortable by revisiting a trial in which White men sat on the jury and Black men and women sat in the mezzanine gallery, that is progress of a sort. What would it tell us about our present-day society if racist mores and practices of 1930’s-era Dixie did not make us feel uncomfortable?
With all due respect to the Biloxi School Board, however, discomfort is not the only feeling that To Kill a Mockingbird inspires. Viewed in our own time, the book and the movie inspire a sense of pride in the progress, however incomplete, that has been made; and a sense of challenge in the progress, however difficult, that may yet be made. That’s the feeling that inspired you as you sat on the livingroom couch watching Atticus Finch walk out of the courtroom.
If you’re about my age that’s exactly when you decided to become a lawyer.
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When Aaron Sorkin brought To Kill A Mockingbird to Broadway, he rewrote the characters to make Atticus Finch a racist. The gravest irony of our times is that this story is now unacceptable to both right and left.
Absolute shame on Sorkin and by association fellow Michigander for performing the roll
Harper Lee also had something to say about Atticus’ prejudices in Go Set a Watchman.
A number of people have brought that up, and I’ve trashed their comments because the later book changes nothing about the earlier book and I really wanted to avoid telling people who brought it up that they ere blithering idiots, as that would be rude.
Go Set a Watchman was the earlier manuscript. She rewrote it to make her message more clear in To Kill a Mockingbird, and did not intend for the earlier version to ever be published. But she didn’t burn it, and eventually someone took advantage of her senile dementia to make some money off her name.
But than – why not? Law is above racism, and a lawyer should be able not only to defend people he despises, but even people of another color.
As a child I didn’t ask if Mr Finch was a racist – that had no meaning to me. I liked him because he did the right thing. And, of course, because I fell in love with his daughter. Lopsided.
Faster than Lawrence of Arabia, more powerful than Jefferson Smith, able to leap Woodward and Bernstein in a single bound.
If someone in contemporary society says TKAM makes people uncomfortable and that it should not be featured in a curriculum (i.e., “banned”), the most likely reason is that they are “liberals” worried that the language (slurs) and storytelling (white savior, passive minorities, false rape accusations) are considered harmful to marginalized identities.
The narratives around book bans offer fantastic opportunities for media and activists to troll the public with arson and hypocrisy. Some concerns are valid, others are War On Christmas demagoguery.
In August of 1960, my father, a lawyer, threw the book on my bed one night and told me to read it. He said it would be the most important book I would ever read. After 40+years teaching law, it still is.
Can’t remember if I ever saw that film. But I clearly remember when my parents, each day after the evening prayer, did read one chapter of “Wer die Nachtigall stört” to us children.
And it did impress me. Not enough, to become a lawyer, but enough, to become interested in the strange hypocritical, but funny american way of live. That’s why today I read Simple Justice.
One of the goals of literature should be to make people uncomfortable. These days seems nearly every book I grew up with fits that bill. People criticize Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer yet forget, or never read that Tom and Huck go to bat for Jim, the escaped slave, at a time they’d have been taking their lives in their hands to do so. Even Hemingway comes with trigger warnings now.
Did you really mean to say “Hemingway comes with trigger warnings?”
Too soon? But the publisher is now putting warnings on his books.
Is becoming a lawyer a good path for an idealist? Count me a sceptic. I don’t mean that as a insult at all, but I think an idealist would have his heart broken in the dry world of the law.
Better to tilt at windmills, because a windmill moves sometimes.