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A Word to the Wise
You remember the scene in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Attorney Atticus Finch is reading outside the jail the evening before the trial of Tom Robinson is about to begin. The mindless mob arrives to have its own kind of justice meted out — at that time and in that place — to Robinson, a black man accused of raping a white woman. The mob is made up of otherwise hard-working, God-fearing, respectable townsfolk struggling to survive in a small Alabama town during the Depresssion. A mob of simple souls acting out in accordance with the mores of a racist society.
The mob asks Finch to step aside. He refuses. The standoff is about to take an ugly turn when Finch's children, Scout and Jem, come forward with their friend Dill. Atticus urges them to leave. They resist. Then, Scout notices the father of a classmate, Walter Cunningham, with whom she has had more than one run-in. She calls out, “Hey, Mr. Cunningham!” At that instant, the mob is no more. It has a face — the collective faces of the individual town folk. Scout, receiving no reply, says “Don't you remember me, Mr. Cunningham? I'm Jean Louise Finch. You brought us some hickory nuts one time, remember? … I go to school with Walter … He's your boy, ain't he? … We brought him home for dinner one time. Maybe he told you about me, I beat him up one time but he was real nice about it. Tell him hey for me, won't you?” After a pause, Mr. Cunningham replies “I'll tell him you said hey, little lady.” He then leads the mob away.
New York in 2003 is not Alabama in the 1930s. Race relations have improved greatly and diversity has just recently been sanctioned by the United States Supreme Court as a goal worthy of legal protection. Some battles have been fought and won, but the war against bias and ignorance continues. Racism in our society may be less virulent perhaps than was the case in Atticus Finch's time, but it is no less a scar on the face of civil liberty in a free society.
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