Music to read by:
“Society blind by colour / Why hold down one to raise another / Discrimination now on both sides / Seeds of hate blossom further.”
'To Kill a Mockingbird' meets the Trayvon Martin shooting.
By William McGurn
Recently
my eighth-grader asked me whether Harper Lee would be a good subject
for an assignment requiring her to write about a favorite author.
I knew my daughter had recently read
"To Kill a Mockingbird" and loved it; and I knew too she remembered we'd
discussed the book after I'd met Miss Lee briefly at a White House
function a few years back. I also thought it a welcome exercise for a
child of suburban New Jersey to imagine herself a girl coming of age in a
small, Depression-era Alabama town.
That's why we were watching the USA
Network Saturday night, when President Barack Obama marked the 50th
anniversary of the film by introducing a new, digitally remastered
version. What I had not foreseen was that the new specials on Harper Lee
and "To Kill a Mockingbird" would come amid headlines about the
shooting of a young, unarmed black man in Sanford, Fla.—or how that
tragedy would become tangled up in assumptions about race that are the
subtext to Miss Lee's story.
One of
the clichés about great literature is that it challenges what we take
for granted. Heroic literature especially underscores the loneliness of
those who take a courageous stand.
In this vein, Miss Lee's story about the Jim Crow South compels us to ask ourselves the tough question: Would we be among the handful standing with Atticus Finch? Or would we be among the many like Miss Gates, the schoolteacher who tells her charges Hitler is evil for persecuting Jews even as she approves of the persecution of the black men and women around her.
In a report on the president's
introduction Saturday night, Britain's Guardian jumped right to the
political: "Obama as Atticus Finch" begins the headline. Although the
president did not link Miss Lee's story to the Trayvon Martin case,
others have, and in a way that implies that the parallels are obvious.
But are they?
Where's the presumption of innocence,
which in the novel was denied Tom Robinson, the black man falsely
accused of raping a white woman? Perhaps it was denied Trayvon Martin,
who, so far as we know, had nothing more menacing on him than a bag of
Skittles when he was killed. Or perhaps it is the shooter George
Zimmerman, who is now in hiding because so many want not justice but his
head?
Who is the Walter Cunningham here—the
hard-working white farmer who seems decent enough but nonetheless
accompanies a lynch mob to the Maycomb, Ala., jail? Might it be Spike
Lee, the filmmaker who in the midst of escalating racial tensions
tweeted out what he thought was Mr. Zimmerman's address. As it turned
out, Mr. Lee had the wrong Zimmermans, but would Atticus have thought it
any better had he had the right ones?
Or what about the novel's newspaper
editor, Mr. Underwood, who in a scathing editorial indicts white Maycomb
by comparing Tom Robinson's death "to the senseless slaughter of
songbirds." Would this be NBC, which edited a 911 tape that made the
accused appear as though he was offering up a comment on race when he
was in fact responding to a question from the police dispatcher?
Where, above
all, is Atticus Finch? Is it the Rev. Al Sharpton, who shares with
Mayella Ewell a phony charge of sexual assault—in his case, falsely
accusing a white assistant district attorney of having raped a teenaged
Tawana Brawley? Is it the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who once spoke about the
anxiety he felt when he heard footsteps approaching him from behind—and
the relief at turning around and seeing "somebody white"? Or the Rev.
C.L. Bryant, a former NAACP leader who like Atticus Finch believes that
justice is something for the courts and accuses the Revs. Sharpton and
Jackson of being "race hustlers"?
In "To Kill a Mockingbird" Miss Lee
showed how lethal the unquestioned assumptions that defined Maycomb
could be. Perhaps the parallel to today is the assumption that a young
black male in a hoodie must be up to no good. Or perhaps it's the
assumption that the threat to young black men comes from angry white
men—a "white Hispanic," as the New York Times described him—when the sad
reality is that killers of young black men are mostly other black men.
In a statement issued before a special
showing of "To Kill a Mockingbird" last Thursday at the White House,
the 85-year-old Miss Lee said she was proud that "Gregory Peck's
portrayal of Atticus Finch lives on." The world, she says, "needs him
now more than ever."
Perhaps. Yet perhaps what we need more
is a novelist who might bring the same deft hand to the racial
assumptions now playing out in Florida that a young Harper Lee brought
to her story of 1930s Alabama.
Related Reading:
A National Travesty
Picture of the Day: If Obama Had A Son, He Would Not Look Like Trayvon
What Would Atticus Do?
Playing With Racial Fire
George Zimmerman's Black Roots: Trayvon Shooter Had a Great-Grandfather Who Was "Afro-Peruvian," New Report Reveals
Sympathy For The Devils, Race-Pimps, Grievance-Mongers, & Great, White Guilt-Trippers?
From Tragedy to National Travesty
Pictures of the Day: If Barack Obama & George Zimmerman's Maternal Great-Grandfathers Had Sons
One by Creed
Affirmative may be justified
Take from one give to another
The goal is to be unified
Take my hand be my brother
The payment silenced the masses
Sanctified by oppression
Unity took a backseat
Sliding further into regression
One, oh one,
The only way is one
I feel angry I feel helpless
Want to change the world
I feel violent I feel alone
Don't try and change my mind
Society blind by color
Why hold down one to raise another
Discrimination now on both sides
Seeds of hate blossom further
The world is heading for mutiny
When all we want is unity
We may rise and fall, but in the end
We meet our fate together
One, oh one,
The only way is one
One, oh one,
The only way is one
I feel angry I feel helpless
Want to change the world
I feel violent I feel alone
Don't try and change my mind
I feel angry I feel helpless
Want to change the world yeah
I feel violent I feel alone
Don't try and change my mind
I feel angry I feel helpless
Want to change the world yeah
I feel violent I feel alone
Don't try and change my mind
Write to MainStreet@wsj.com
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