Atticus Relevant Today

One of the finest novels written in American history is To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. While this rich novel paints the portrait of the south in the 1930’s, it still speaks true to the human condition and our current political and social climate. For this reason, To Kill A Mockingbird is a relevant novel in our society today.

Let us first look at the novel’s definition of courage. Atticus says on page 273, “Some Negroes lie, some Negroes are immoral, some Negro men are not to be trusted around women... But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men. There is not a person in this room... who has never done an immoral thing in his life.”

In saying this, Atticus is not trying to accuse people,

This man today is Brian Stevenson, who represents discriminated individuals as a lawyer. As NPR reported in October 2014, he made a name for himself representing Walter McMillian, who was convicted of killing 18-year-old Ronda Morrison, who was found under a clothing rack at a dry cleaner in Monroeville, Ala., in 1986. Three witnesses testified against McMillian, while six witnesses, who were black, testified that he was at a church fish fry at the time of the crime. McMillian was found guilty and held on death row for six years. "It was a pretty clear situation where everyone just wanted to forget about this man, let him get executed so everybody could move on. [There was] a lot of passion, a lot of anger in the community about [Morrison's] death, and I think there was great resistance to someone coming in and fighting for the condemned person who had been accused and convicted." After representing this man, McMillan was cleared of all charges.

While Mr. Stevenson was able to clear his client and Atticus wasn’t, a clear parallel can be drawn between the two. Both are willing to take on challenging social issues that others simply won’t, exhibiting Atticus’s definition of true courage. They do their jobs with resolve and are effective. Perhaps if everyone were as courageous as these two men we wouldn’t have the injustice that minorities of all types have

Atticus has raised Scout to not discriminate based upon race. This is perhaps illustrated most effectively in chapter 13 of the novel, when Calpurnia invites Scout and Jem to her church services. Adults in the town would be mortified, and Aunt Alexandria is later in the book, but it never even occurs to Scout that this is scandalous thing. The point that Ms. Lee is trying to make at this point in the book is one that is significant today: people are not born discriminating against others, we are trained to hate others.

In his column in the Miami New Times in 2011, Luther Campbell wrote, “by the time the toddlers are old enough to attend elementary school, they learn to dislike others based on their skin color, ethnicity, or gender. It starts at home, where kids overhear their parents talking bad about Hialeah's Hispanics or Liberty City's African-Americans or Aventura's various ethnicities. Once children hear something negative about a place or a group of people, they hold onto the stereotype until someone corrects