Defending Atticus Finch: New at Reason

There is a bitter irony in the fact that the final year in the life of legendary novelist Harper Lee, who died last week at 89, was marked by what many saw as her hero’s inglorious downfall. Lee’s second book, Go Set a Watchman—a sort-of-sequel, sort-of-first-draft to her 1960 classic, To Kill a Mockingbird—showed the revered Atticus Finch, a white lawyer who stood up to racial injustice in the 1930s South, as a cantankerous old bigot defending segregation twenty years later. Many were appalled; but others applauded. That reaction was summed up in the title of a New York Times op-ed by University of Miami law professor Osamudia James: “Now We Can Finally Say Goodbye to the White Savior Myth of Atticus.” On the feminist blog Jezebel, writer Catherine Nichols asserted that without the corrective ofWatchman, Mockingbird is a “shameful” and “racist” book, and Atticus is a virtuous white patriarch who believes in being kind to blacks (and women) and keeping them in their place.

The campaign to knock Atticus off his pedestal started long before Watchman, notes Cathy Young. Both Mockingbird and its hero have been criticized for naïve and simplistic moralism and for perpetuating the idea that a white man’s individual goodness and benevolence is an adequate answer to pervasive racial oppression. But the naysayers are wrong, Young argues. To Kill a Mockingbird will endure as Lee’s legacy, and its morality is far less naïve and more complex than the critiques allow. Atticus, too, will endure, as a good, flawed—and yes, often heroic—man who does not always have the right answers but always tries to live by his conscience.

View this article.