© 2015 The Texas Lawbook.
(Feb. 25) – America’s leading Civil Rights historian, Pulitzer Prize-winner Taylor Branch, spoke at SMU on February 12, 2016, and made the following point about the nature of society:
“In history, there are two kinds of people: insiders and outsiders.”
That observation resonated in the context of Harper Lee’s passing on February 19. Oprah Winfrey called To Kill a Mockingbird “our national novel.” It hit the book market in July 1960 with perfect timing in the big middle of the American Civil Rights movement, and continues to sell in large quantities more than a half century after its release.
In the book’s setting of the small Southern town during the Great Depression, bigots made up most of the population and were the “insiders.” They excluded African-Americans from their hotels, restaurants, neighborhoods, schools, and restrooms; and as far as jurisprudence went, kept them off their juries, and allowed them to watch trials only from the courtroom’s segregated balcony.
Any Maycomb resident of the Mockingbird era who somehow believed black people merited color-blind justice or were entitled to civil rights was labeled and treated by most local folks as an “outsider.”
Historically, “insiders” and “outsiders” don’t connect socially; rather, they intentionally disconnect, and things go downhill from there.
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird flipped the switch on society. She portrayed the racist insiders (who tried to lynch Tom Robinson before his trial, and who killed him after the verdict came back) as the mean, nasty people they were. They may have been inside the scope of Maycomb’s social strata, but they were outside the scope of any moral compass.
Conversely, outsider Scout Finch got into a fight at school with a boy who chastised her because her dad was defending a black man; while Atticus stood alone in front of the town’s jail, the single outsider willing to prevent his client Tom Robinson from being lynched by a mob made up of the area’s mainstream residents.
Atticus also begged the stacked-deck, all-white jury during the closing argument of Tom Robinson’s trial to recognize that “there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal . . . That institution is a court . . . The integrity of our courts and the jury system are no ideal to me; they are a living, working reality. . . So, gentlemen, in the name of God, do your duty.”
Though the jury chose to ignore Atticus’ argument and the evidence presented at trial, and found Tom Robinson guilty of raping Mayella Ewell, by the end of the book, the reader’s heart has gravitated toward and ultimately become bound with Maycomb’s outsiders: Atticus, Scout, and the town’s African-American community; and is disgusted by the town’s insiders.
Through the power of literature, readers of Mockingbird received the opportunity to rise above social norms; see higher justice and wisdom; and recognize that outsiders often have perspectives worthy of consideration; while insiders’ views often deserve rejection.
Just as Harper Lee’s first-published, second-written book, To Kill a Mockingbird, presents higher truths about America’s race relations, her second-published, first-written book, Go Set a Watchman, which came out last year, also provides higher truths that I detailed in my article in the September 2015 issue of The Texas Bar Journal.
In Watchman, as of the mid-1950s when the book is set, Atticus Finch has become a Maycomb insider by joining the “Citizens’ Council” which, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s holding in Brown vs. Board of Education, sought to slow the pace of integration in the town’s public schools.
As the book opens, twenty-something year old Jean Louise Finch (fka “Scout” in her childhood) returns home to Maycomb after living in New York City several years – and immediately emerges as the book’s outsider.
Toward Watchman’s end, after learning what’s been happening since the Brown decision came down, Jean Louise scolds her father with four-letter word force about his unenlightened attitude toward school integration, yet the ever-patient, self-controlled Atticus refuses to answer fire with fire.
The daughter’s perspective on equal educational opportunity makes her social consciousness worthy of the reader’s admiration, but calling her dad a “son of a bitch” earns her disfavor from Uncle Jack Finch (Atticus’ brother), who berates her over the angry verbal abuse she has heaped on her father.
The book’s higher truth is not about race relations of the era, but rather focuses on the need for insiders and outsiders with conflicting political/moral viewpoints to get along, listen, and speak respectfully toward each other, especially when they cross swords.
Through her vehicle Watchman, Harper Lee provided readers with the following specific lessons on rising above the fray to maintain civil discourse with one’s adversaries:
i) Don’t judge anyone by his words or acts until you know his motives.
ii) A person can condemn his enemies, but it’s better to know them.
iii) Hypocrites have as much right to live in the world as anybody else, particularly since people tend to carry their honesty in pigeonholes.
iv) No one can succeed in life by dependently clinging onto the conscience of someone else, no matter how virtuous that other person may appear to be.
v) If a person refuses to take time to understand a person holding different views, he will never grow.
vi) Someone’s maintaining civility and humility while being engaged in disagreements has a transforming effect on the person on the other side of the argument.
vii) Addressing confrontation over conflicting ideological positions is “like an airplane. One side is the drag, the other is the thrust, and together they can fly – though too much of the thrust makes it nose heavy, and too much drag and it’s tail heavy – it’s a matter of balance.”
Once again delivering a book with perfect timing about a subject on the forefront of our national psyche, in 2016, before and after Harper Lee’s death, there are people within the Democratic Party who support one presidential candidate and, therefore, consider themselves insiders; while believing that those who support the other candidate are outsiders. The same is true of people within the Republican Party about their choice in candidates.
Because of this dysfunctional dynamic, there is precious little civil discourse going on in either party, or in national and global politics.
As with Mockingbird and its higher wisdom about race relations, we need to absorb and embrace the higher wisdom of Harper Lee found in Watchman about the necessary civility of discourse that needs to take place between insiders and outsiders before American society can think about rising from the fractious, partisan ditch our politics have now put us in.
In both books, Harper Lee opened our minds and showed us the way toward a higher level of consciousness – and for this, may she always be remembered as a person who advanced humanity’s understanding of its flaws, needs, and hopes.
Talmage Boston is a shareholder in the Dallas office of Winstead PC; and the author of Raising the Bar: The Crucial Role of the Lawyer in Society (TexasBarBooks 2012), and Cross-Examining History: A Lawyer Gets Answers From the Experts About America’s Presidents (Bright Sky Press 2016) to be released September 1, 2016.
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