Like most other Southerners growing up during the early and middle stages of the civil rights struggle, I underwent many adjustments in my attitudes from 1950 to 1960. From a segregated society to the beginnings of mixing with those of color, I became aware of the peculiarity of the customs under which I had formed my opinions of colored folk. Journalism, mostly national but in one instance local, made me aware of how the rest of the country did not resemble the South.
I came to know that the statements I heard daily on the differences between the races and the necessity of segregation were terribly flawed and at bottom, evil. A challenge to my concepts of respect for my elders, these thoughts re-framed my ideas, though I was circumspect in sharing these changes with my parents. My parents were moderate for the times, and enforced respectful treatment by their children of the colored help they, my grandparents, and other family members employed. To utter “nigger,” even out of the hearing of colored people, was at least equal to the “F” word. My father became involved with a biracial group of businessmen, politicians and ministers who hammered out compromises and phased-in desegregation of public places and eventually the schools.
This did not mean that the attitudes of the past were vanished from my elders’ understanding of society, just that to resist meant disturbances and confrontations which would not be helpful to an orderly and peaceable society. This is what I grew up understanding as “moderate” Southern thinking on the race issue.
An article, “The Courthouse Ring,” in this week’s New Yorker examines this mindset in an earlier manifestation, by analyzing the book and movie, To Kill a Mockingbird, specifically the exact nature of Atticus Finch’s “Jim Crow Liberalism.” The book and movie have become iconic in the national consciousness of racial justice, bigotry and a largeness of spirit in confronting our history of such defining problems. Atticus is a towering figure in the popular mind. In Malcolm Gladwell’s article, some contradictions and extrapolations from them are made, raising other questions in my mind. I would never have found parallels between Big Jim Folsom, Alabama governor and the apotheosis of the old-style populist Southern politician, who courted colored as well as white votes.
Gladwell’s conclusions regarding Atticus Finch, and Southern liberals of the era, is that differences in color did matter, but so did class, and there was a tri-partite structure to Southern society; colored, polite white, white trash. Those whites in positions of respect and authority felt a responsibility towards their colored coevals, and an obligation to contain the excesses of the trashy whites. Gladwell points out that these layered attitudes, especially regarding the whites who while not “polite,” whose necks were definitely red, but did have self respect, amounted to humanizing the face of Jim Crow. True. The book takes place in the mid-193os in the rural South. If Atticus and all his class were of this century, in similar positions of prominence, for sure their attitudes would be much more grounded in a just sense of our common humanity. Persons of that time had the baggage of their history, their families’ values and the necessity of dealing daily with persons much more flawed and intransigent than themselves.
To Kill a Mockingbird, then, is a story wrapped in a time and a reality that has gone, and the virtues of our lives now were but imperfectly foreshadowed then, not even in Harper Lee’s evocative novel. I understand the points Mr. Gladwell makes, and to the degree outlined here, I can conditionally agree. The one puzzling remark in the article, given its expression of regard for Atticus’s liberalism, is the following quotation from the book, and especially Gladwell’s description of it:
Scout relates, in one of American literature’s most moving passages:
“Miss Jean Louise?”
I looked around. They were standing. All around us and in the balcony on the opposite wall, the Negroes were getting to their feet. Reverend Sykes’s voice was as distant as Judge Taylor’s:
“Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passin’.”
The emphasis I have added marks my puzzlement at Gladwell’s finding this passage so moving, in light of his tempered view of the “Jim Crow Liberalism” of Atticus. More puzzling because I have found that passage so discordant with any likely reaction by the colored spectators at the terrible injustice done to Tom Robinson, more of the same they have witnessed for fifty years and counting. Yes, Atticus has done more than most whites in Maycomb would have, but the result is no different. The scene makes for great drama, written and performed, but I am surprised that Mr. Gladwell praises it so warmly.
So, while the analysis of Southern liberalism has much justice – from a distant perspective of years – Atticus still ranks as someone who did the best he thought he could, given the time and the constraints of his social equals. It is well to remember that thoroughgoing Saints do not often live to raise their children, and the red liturgical color of martyrdom marks their memorial days.
