The most dramatic feature of her “new” novel, “Go Set a Watchman” - written before “To Kill a Mockingbird” but published 55 years afterward - is the revelation that Atticus, the supposed paragon of probity, courage and wisdom, was a white supremacist. This column by a legal academic, published in a relatively obscure trade journal, so enraged admirers of Atticus Finch that this newspaper published an article about the column and the impassioned responses it provoked.ĭismissed by some as the ravings of a curmudgeon, Freedman’s impression of Atticus Finch has now been largely ratified by none other than his creator, Harper Lee herself. He told his children that the Ku Klux Klan was merely “a political organization” and that the leader of the lynch mob was “basically a good man” albeit with “blind spots along with the rest of us.” To Freedman, Finch’s acts and omissions defined a lawyer who lived his life as a “passive participant” in “pervasive injustice.” Rather, Freedman inferred that Finch failed to oppose Jim Crow custom because he was at home with it. In Freedman’s view, however, those considerations were not decisive in influencing Atticus Finch. Confrontation would have had little chance at success and a large likelihood of provoking retaliation against the defendant. At the time of this fictional trial, there would have been good strategic reasons for forgoing objection to these customs. Freedman noted, however, that Finch did not volunteer to represent Robinson he did so only upon assignment by the court, saying that he had “hoped to get through life without a case of this kind.” Freedman also pointed out that Finch abstained from challenging the obvious illicit racial exclusion of blacks from the jury that wrongly convicted Robinson and the racial segregation in the courtroom itself, where blacks were confined to the balcony. Generations have admired Finch for his fidelity to due process even at the risk of unpopularity and personal harm.
Not only did Finch ably defend Robinson in court one evening he also faced down a mob that sought to abduct the defendant from jail in order to lynch him. What’s more, Robinson was accused of having raped a white woman. Lee had portrayed Finch as zealously representing a black man, Tom Robinson, despite intense disapproval from many whites. He asserted that Atticus Finch, the iconic hero of Harper Lee’s novel “To Kill a Mockingbird,” ought not be lauded as a role model for attorneys. In 1992, a law professor named Monroe Freedman published an article in Legal Times, a magazine for practitioners.
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