A Light in the Atticus
Revisiting the heroic lawyer of 'To Kill a Mockingbird'

Harper Lee's beloved novel To Kill a Mockingbird, and the classic 1962 film starring Gregory Peck, got the full legal review Feb. 15 in front of an audience at Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Three UB Law School academics were part of a panel discussing the judicial aspects of Mockingbird, whose key conflict revolves around the defense by principled lawyer Atticus Finch of a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in 1935 Alabama.

Gary Earl Ross, Prof. Stephanie Phillips Prof. Elizabeth Mensch, Sam Magavern

The program came in conjunction with a National Endowment for the Arts program called The Big Read, which encourages entire communities to read the same book, and it preceded a showing of the film.

UB Law adjunct professor Sam Magavern, moderator of the panel, began by reminding the audience of the book's plot, centered on Atticus' children Scout and Jem, and on their mysterious, reclusive neighbor Boo Radley.

Boo, said Magavern, is a key figure in the book's legal pedigree; he is a recluse because as a teenager he was put under house arrest after falling in with a gang, and at age 33 was briefly locked in the courtroom basement after stabbing his father with scissors. The climax of the story explores the issue of law versus justice, when the sheriff decides not to prosecute Boo for killing a man who was threatening to hurt the children.

Professor Stephanie Phillips, calling Mockingbird "one of my favorite books," spoke of the social and political context in which the novel was released. It was published in 1960, she noted, "at the height of the civil rights movement, and before Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. It reminded the nation of some of the issues that were on the table right then."

Gary Earl Ross (speaking), Sam Magavern

Phillips said that despite Atticus' heroic defense, "the particular realities of life in Alabama almost certainly doomed Tom Robinson and other black men in similar predicaments." She spoke of the thousands of people, most of them black men, who were lynched for real or imagined crimes, and said juries were routinely all-male and all-white because they were drawn from voter rolls from which blacks were discouraged by such means as the poll tax or literacy tests.

"Could such a jury be relied upon to render an impartial verdict that was based on the evidence?" she asked. "No, particularly if the evidence involved a black witness and a white witness whose testimony contradicted each other," as is the case in Mockingbird.

SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Elizabeth Mensch went deeper into the character of Atticus Finch, saying that he is "part of a declining Southern gentry culture" who derives his authority from that position of privilege. "Atticus never steps outside that authority, he never questions that authority, he never condemns the social structure of which he is a part," Mensch said.

Prof. Elizabeth Mensch, Sam Magavern, Prof. Stephanie Phillips

Nevertheless, she said, she sees Atticus as a virtuous lawyer, and said his virtue stems not from legal codes but from Judeo-Christian morality. "Atticus teaches the children to see in the most unlikely people a possibility, a touch of a better reality that is only partially revealed," she said, quoting Gregory Peck's character as saying, "People are nice if you only see them."

"In theological terms," Mensch said, "this represents the very difficult discipline of always seeing the other person as both redeemed and forgiven at the same time."

Writer Gary Earl Ross, who teaches in UB's Educational Opportunity Center, spoke about To Kill a Mockingbird as fiction and what makes it work as art. "Is Atticus Finch a good lawyer?" he asked. "That is irrelevant. He is a fictional lawyer, and he has to serve a certain purpose to make the story worthwhile. As a person of his time, Atticus represents the point of transformation, the point at which things begin to change because he plants a seed.

"What we have in To Kill a Mockingbird is the beginning of something that would transform that town. I love it for that reason, that it is one representation of how things start to change."

A spirited discussion period raised such questions as "Was Tom Robinson's conviction inevitable?" (yes, given Atticus' ridicule of Tom's accuser on the witness stand), and "Was it the right decision to cover up the truth that Boo Radley killed a man to save the children?" (probably yes, though Mensch said, "One could argue that that was a denial of Boo's agency").

"Morality and truth are both situational," Ross said, "and there is a larger truth here. The sheriff recognizes that this is just too much change at one time, and we cannot deal with it." But Magavern responded, "I am not as sure as my co-panelists. The assumption that Boo wants to be a recluse is questionable to me, and the assumption that he wanted to be protected from other people is questionable as well. I think they could have asked him."