A Medal for Miss Lee
What would Atticus Finch make of the "high-tech lynching" of Clarence Thomas?
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Thursday, November 8, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST
The Presidential Medal of Freedom was awarded on Monday to Harper Lee, the author of "To Kill a Mockingbird."
"To Kill a Mockingbird"--in part the story of lawyer Atticus Finch's doomed defense of a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in 1930s Alabama--is arguably the most famous book on American civil rights ever written. Publishers Weekly estimates it has sold some 30 million copies. Look it up on Amazon.com and you will find it has about 1,688 "customer reviews."
So to the millions of student essay questions built around this book, let me add one more: Compare and contrast "To Kill a Mockingbird" to the current bestselling book, "My Grandfather's Son," by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Justice Thomas in fact mentions "To Kill a Mockingbird" twice in his autobiography. It was his grandmother Tina's favorite book. And in the summer of his second year of law school, he traveled with a black attorney to a small Georgia town to help represent a man accused of raping a white woman. "It looked just like the courtroom scene in 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' " he said. Except the defendant was white.
"To Kill a Mockingbird" is literature and art, but there can be little doubt that Harper Lee wrote her novel to make a political point about the status of blacks in the South in the early 1960s. Rosa Parks had refused to yield her bus seat in 1955. The novel was released on Christmas day in 1961, still early in this important period. The famous movie came out the following year, with lawyer Atticus Finch portrayed by Gregory Peck.
By now, "To Kill a Mockingbird" is wholly folded into the political life of the country. It is safe to say that most Democrats would consider the book to be an iconic testament to their legacy, liberalism's greatest achievement. One imagines that Harper Lee would agree with this.
But as with Justice Thomas's famously sphinx-like demeanor during oral arguments at the Supreme Court, there has been nary a peep in more than 40 years about the book's meaning from Miss Lee (it would sound absurd to refer to her as Ms. Lee). While schoolchildren today are assigned the book as an exercise in the formation of social virtue, Harper Lee herself saw the novel as about more than that. Indeed, one reads nearly 90 pages into the novel's account of Scout and Jem Finch in Maycomb before the racial drama arrives.
In time, "To Kill a Mockingbird" got in the traps of acute political sensitivity. There were objections to her use of "nigger." This is absurd, but after the attempted book bannings of "Huckleberry Finn" and "To Kill a Mockingbird," it is unlikely any novelist today would risk similar assault by writing "nigger" in any context.
Amid one of the attempted bans of her book by a Virginia school board, Harper Lee sent off a letter in 1966 to the Richmond News Leader: "Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that 'To Kill a Mockingbird' spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners."
Clarence Thomas is a son of the heritage that was Harper Lee's South. His description of his hometown, Pinpoint, Ga., is similarly idyllic to Harper Lee's fictional Maycomb in Alabama. When he was 6, though, Mr. Thomas's mother moved with him and his brother to Savannah. "When I was a boy," Mr. Thomas writes, "Savannah was hell." The physical poverty and squalor Mr. Thomas describes during their early years in Savannah is astonishing. "The toilet was outdoors in the muddy backyard," its metal bowl cracked and rusty, its wooden seat rotting. His mother chose to use a chamber pot, which Clarence emptied. He appears to have had virtually no significant contact with white people until high school.
We may assume that Harper Lee composed her remarkable story about the unjustly accused and gunned-down Tom Robinson so that some day a Clarence Thomas could rise from Pinpoint to the nation's highest Court. If so, we then have to account for this famous and still-astounding statement by Judge Thomas toward the end of his corrosive confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court:
"From my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree."
This wasn't 1961. It was 1991.
The depth of Mr. Thomas's bitterness and anger over the racism he experienced in the South and North--expressed throughout "My Grandfather's Son"--is profound. The only other force that seems to have touched every corner of Mr. Thomas's being is his grandfather, "Daddy," who raised him. It is hard to miss the similarities between Harper Lee's stiff-necked lawyer, distant father and hero, Atticus Finch, and Clarence Thomas's hero, his strait-laced grandfather.
What Mr. Thomas absorbed from his grandfather, in an often harsh and brutal manner, is precisely what Harper Lee said is at the core of "To Kill a Mockingbird": a code of honor and conduct. Atticus Finch, I think, would have objected to what was done to Clarence Thomas in that Senate confirmation hearing.
Today a black man is running for the presidency. Perhaps the campaign is too long and perhaps Barack Obama is too young and too inexperienced to be president. Consider, though, the current knock on Mr. Obama. It is that he won't attack Hillary with sufficient aggression, that he is too gentlemanly, even too "professorial" in demeanor. Presumably his critics would prefer the slashing tongue of a hip-hop performer than the self-contained Barack Obama, who epitomizes middle-class black achievement. Well, 15 years ago they preferred something other than the conservative middle-class black man sent to the Supreme Court.
In his remarks presenting the Medal of Freedom to Miss Lee, President Bush said, "As a model of . . . humane sensibility, this book will be read and studied forever." Maybe some folks should reread it.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Thursdays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
opinionjournal.com |
