Billiken Bookmarks: Reading Picks From SLU Authors

Atticus Finch: The Biography by Joseph Crespino

In his new biography Atticus, historian Joseph Crespino delves into the life of Harper Lee’s father, Amasa Coleman (A.C.) Lee, and demonstrates that he harbored conservative views on race and politics, even joining an organization dedicated to fighting integration known as the Citizens’ Councils (a group typically described as a sort of upscale, respectable Ku Klux Klan). A.C. Lee and Atticus, Crespino argues, are essentially the same person, a point that Harper Lee made relatively clear in her first book Go Set a Watchman (which her editor rejected), but then muted in her second book, To Kill a Mockingbird (which went on to become an international bestseller). In her first book, she told the story of a young Alabama woman, Louise Finch, who returns home from a stint in New York City and is shocked that her kindly father has become an embittered racist. In her second book, by contrast, Lee picks up Louise’s life as a young girl named “Scout” in the 1930s whose father respects blacks and bravely defends an African American, Tom Robinson, in court.

As Crespino explains it, Lee softened her portrayal of Atticus just as racial politics in Alabama hardened. Moderates like James Folsom fell to race-baiters like John Patterson, who won the gubernatorial election of 1958, while the Ku Klux Klan ironed its sheets and resurged across the state, even parading through the streets of Monroeville, Lee’s home. Crespino argues that midst this fury, Lee felt pressure to soften her portrayal of the South lest she be maligned by her hometown friends, and also to speak to those friends, to “her tribe,” perhaps aiming to bring them around to a more liberal set of views.

This is an interesting take, and recommended reading for anyone who might wonder how Finch’s story fits into southern political history generally at the time. 

There’s an aspect of Mockingbird that Crespino does not explore, namely the plight of white southerners who did not endorse racial extremism. I take up this question in my new book, The Burning House: Jim Crow and the Making of Modern America, which focuses on southern intellectuals like Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty, and Harper Lee: all of whom viewed racial segregation not simply as a form of repression but as pluralism, an arrangement that encouraged the development of separate institutions, separate traditions, and even separate cultures in the South. These folks, for the most part, did not join the Citizens’ Councils, a group that boasted only 60,000 members at their peak, hardly a significant percentage of the total white population in the region.

Noting this is important. As racist as the South may have been, its commitment to pluralism boasted a positive aspect as well, particularly when we compare it to the rise of white supremacy in Europe at the same time. Just as the American South began to formalize Jim Crow in the 1890s, in other words, a wave of ethnic nationalism swept Europe that would culminate in two catastrophic world wars and a holocaust. The first was triggered by an ethnic Serb nationalist from Bosnia named Gavrilo Princip, who dreamed of forging a greater Yugoslavia out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The second was sparked by an ethnic German nationalist from Austria, Adolf Hitler, who dreamt of forging a greater Germany in central Europe. According to historians, Hitler drew inspiration from the United States, particularly its treatment of Native Americans and immigrants, but did not like the idea of segregation as practiced in the American South.

To the Nazis, segregation actually prevented the creation of a racially pure state by fostering pluralism, i.e. the cohabitation of different peoples, and different cultures, in the same space. Such an arrangement would not be compatible with an Aryan Reich, nor would it necessarily help the Nazis subjugate their most vilified minority, Jews. So long as Jews retained their own spaces, feared Germans, they would also retain their own power. This led to the Nuremburg Laws, which encouraged the out-migration of Jews to Israel in the 1930s and, of course, the Holocaust with the onset of World War II.

What happened in the South was different. African Americans fought Jim Crow, built resilient communities, and ended up producing leaders who became critical to the redefinition of the United States in the post-World War II era. This included Andrew Young, John Lewis and, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr. They were not just American, they were southern – and they did just what white southerners expected of them: they created their own communities, their own traditions, and even their narratives of the United States. And they won.

Anders Walker, Ph.D., J.D., is the Lillie Myers Professor of Law and associate dean for research and engagement at Saint Louis University School of Law. He is a five-time recipient of SLU LAW’s “Faculty Member of the Year” Award, chosen by each year’s graduating class. His research and teaching focus on intersections between constitutional law, criminal law and legal history. Walker’s new book The Burning House: Jim Crow and the Making of Modern America (Yale University Press, 2018) was published in March of this year, and he is having a book signing and discussion at 7 p.m., Wednesday, Aug. 29, at Left Bank Books. He is also the author of The Ghost of Jim Crow: How Southern Moderates Used Brown v. Board of Education to Stall Civil Rights (Oxford University Press, 2009).