Jon Meacham: Atticus Finch and Benjamin Hooks
[Jon Meacham is the editor of Newsweek.]
On a beautiful autumn morning in 2007, a small but important pageant of American history unfolded in the East Room of the White House. The occasion was a ceremony, hosted by President George W. Bush, to present the Presidential Medal of Freedom to a small group of distinguished Americans: Brian Lamb of C-Span was one, as was the ailing Henry Hyde, represented by his son Bob. Another was Harper Lee, the Alabama-born writer whose To Kill a Mockingbirdgave the whites of the Jim Crow South an object lesson in how they might at least begin to atone for the sins of segregation.
...Good does not really triumph over evil in To Kill a Mockingbird, not for Tom Robinson, the black man wrongly convicted of rape. In Lee's all-too-real rendering, the only redemptive feature of the white criminal-justice system in the Robinson case is that the all-white jury took a bit of time before convicting, rather than coming back quickly. Progress of a sort, perhaps, but it was not progress if you were Tom Robinson, who was shot to death after the trial. "In our courts, when it's a white man's word against a black man's," Atticus tells his son, Jem, "the white man always wins." The novel is not a fairy tale, then, despite the sentiment that now shrouds it, but an honest portrait of a region, and of a nation, forever contending with the conflict between power and conscience.
I was in the audience in the White House that day and was reminded of the morning's events when news came last Thursday of the death of Benjamin L. Hooks, the civil-rights leader and minister who was honored immediately before Lee was. A son of the segregated South, born in Memphis in 1925, Hooks endured the injustices inflicted by the whites of whom Lee wrote. Best known as the leader of the NAACP from 1977 to 1992, he is one of a slowly disappearing cadre of civil-rights giants, men and women who, not so long ago, marched and worked to press America to apply the inherent meaning of its founding premise—that all men are created equal—to everyone....
Read entire article at Newsweek
On a beautiful autumn morning in 2007, a small but important pageant of American history unfolded in the East Room of the White House. The occasion was a ceremony, hosted by President George W. Bush, to present the Presidential Medal of Freedom to a small group of distinguished Americans: Brian Lamb of C-Span was one, as was the ailing Henry Hyde, represented by his son Bob. Another was Harper Lee, the Alabama-born writer whose To Kill a Mockingbirdgave the whites of the Jim Crow South an object lesson in how they might at least begin to atone for the sins of segregation.
...Good does not really triumph over evil in To Kill a Mockingbird, not for Tom Robinson, the black man wrongly convicted of rape. In Lee's all-too-real rendering, the only redemptive feature of the white criminal-justice system in the Robinson case is that the all-white jury took a bit of time before convicting, rather than coming back quickly. Progress of a sort, perhaps, but it was not progress if you were Tom Robinson, who was shot to death after the trial. "In our courts, when it's a white man's word against a black man's," Atticus tells his son, Jem, "the white man always wins." The novel is not a fairy tale, then, despite the sentiment that now shrouds it, but an honest portrait of a region, and of a nation, forever contending with the conflict between power and conscience.
I was in the audience in the White House that day and was reminded of the morning's events when news came last Thursday of the death of Benjamin L. Hooks, the civil-rights leader and minister who was honored immediately before Lee was. A son of the segregated South, born in Memphis in 1925, Hooks endured the injustices inflicted by the whites of whom Lee wrote. Best known as the leader of the NAACP from 1977 to 1992, he is one of a slowly disappearing cadre of civil-rights giants, men and women who, not so long ago, marched and worked to press America to apply the inherent meaning of its founding premise—that all men are created equal—to everyone....