Why Harper Lee's Mockingbird still sings

In 2013, a curious obituary written by journalist John Archibald appeared in a website about Alabama. The obituary mourned the passing away of one of its best known lawyers and argued that outside the small town that he lived and practised in, he was better known for his greatest legal failure. A case involving the defence of a black man, Tom Robinson, accused of raping a white woman. The obituary described the lawyer as having the "good looks of a Gregory Peck and the courtroom presence of a Clarence Darrow" and most importantly, ageless. The lawyer in question was of course Atticus Finch, the beloved character from Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird.

Finch, more than any other person, has arguably been responsible for inspiring many young people to become lawyers, harbouring a romantic notion that legal practice was one of the key sites for struggles for justice and equality, a notion which often gets quickly corrupted with an actual encounter with the legal system, and yet as the epigraph (from Charles Lamb) in Lee’s book reminds us “Lawyer's, I suppose, were children once”.

In around a week's time Lee’s book Go Set a Watchman will be released, a novel which follows Scout Finch as an adult visiting her father 20 years after the events of Mockingbird. The book itself was allegedly written before Mockingbird and has not been without its publishing controversies, but I for one am eagerly looking forward to it since I count myself amongst those who's influenced by an early encounter with Mockingbird, and to becoming a child again. Charles Dickens gets his finger on the pulse when he wrote in Great Expectation: "In the little world in which children have their existence, there is nothing so finely perceived and finely felt, as injustice".

What else, if not this finely perceived sense of injustice, explains Mockingbird’s lasting appeal?

Told from the perspective of a six-year-old (I remember clearly the strange thrill caused by her addressing Atticus by his first name) who witnesses a racial trial which ends in a wrongful conviction. It is impossible to forget that Lee herself would have been six-years-old when the US Supreme court gave its decision in Powell versus Alabama, the infamous "Scottsboro boys" case in which nine black men were arrested for allegedly raping a woman in a train. The criminal trial was an absolute sham: none of the defendants were able to contact their relatives, the defence lawyer turned out to be drunk who did not know Alabama law, his replacement had no time to prepare, or to even consult with his clients. Not surprisingly, all nine men were found guilty, despite medical testimony, which found absolutely no evidence of rape. Eight of the nine men received the death penalty; the ninth was a minor. The convictions finally went all the way up to the Supreme Court.

In words that echo the spectral presence of the lynch mob as the repressed unconsciousness of any legal system, the court in a historic judgement held that there was a serious mistrial since the defendants had been denied their right to legal counsel, and to deny that “is not to proceed promptly in the calm spirit of regulated justice but to go forward with the haste of the mob". They also held that the right to counsel is of the “'fundamental principles of liberty and justice which lie at the base of all our civil and political institutions". The Powell judgement is regarded as one of the important predecessors to the subsequent race decisions like Brown versus Board of education.

For Lee, growing up in Alabama at the time of the Scottsboro trial, it would have been impossible to escape the public debate on race and justice, but more than the final Supreme Court verdict, if there is someone who would possibly have served as a role model for Finch, it would be James E Horton, the judge who presided over the second trial of one of the accused. Though the jury returned with a guilty verdict, Horton decided to set aside the verdict despite knowing that his judgement would virtually end his career as an elected judge. In the course of the trial Horton scandalised people by shaking hands with black reporters, and on hearing of plans for a lynching, Horton severely criticised them by calling them "cowardly murderers". It is reported that Horton entered the trial convinced of the guilt of the accused but changed his mind in the face of evidence, concluding that "deliberate injustice is more fatal to the one who imposes it than to the one on whom it is imposed". A sentence worthy of Dickens’ characterisation of a finely perceived sense of justice, and a worthy role model for Finch.

So if the real world spills over into Lee’s fictive one, it also spills from the fictive into the real, and in 1997, the Alabama State Bar erected a monument to Finch in Monroeville. Robin West, a leading law and literature scholar reminds us that "legal theory is a product not only of our philosophical commitments and political will, but also of our narrative imagination". She adds: "The point is not necessarily to be able to answer the question of what is justice, but the possibility of reconstructing the question through another experience, namely through literature".

Amongst all the memorials erected to Finch, there is perhaps no greater one than that of his legal failure reminding us that the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) and Section 377 still remain in the law books, young Muslim men are still routinely arrested and convicted without evidence, and for that reason alone, it might be worth rereading Mockingbird.