Introduction.Baggett.Docx (Do Not Delete) 1/14/2017 11:46 Am

1-INTRODUCTION.BAGGETT.DOCX (DO NOT DELETE) 1/14/2017 11:46 AM INTRODUCTION J. MARK BAGGETT1 This issue of the Cumberland Law Review is devoted to Harper Lee, whose death on February 19, 2016, closed the last eventful chapter of her life. Her novel Go Set a Watchman, the early draft of the novel that was revised to become To Kill a Mockingbird, was published on July 14, 2015 to swirling controversies over her capacity to assent to publish, over the ethics of publishing a rough draft as an independent work, and over the depiction of Atticus Finch, now a segregationist who works to keep the NAACP out of Maycomb and who opposes Brown v. Board of Education. All lawyers are invested in Harper Lee. In To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), she exposed the injustices of the entire legal system in the South to an international audience, who reacted with revulsion. Her novel helped propel the Civil Rights Movement. Even in 2015, the popularity of To Kill a Mockingbird was largely responsible for the massive sales of Go Set a Watchman, one of the biggest events in American publishing history. Lee’s creation of Atticus Finch, based on her father, has sustained his iconic status. His moral courage in defending Tom Rob- inson has made him the role model for lawyers everywhere, the em- bodiment of Thoreau’s dictum, “Any man more right than his neigh- bors constitutes a majority of one already.” So powerful was Lee’s fictional character that Atticus has become almost an historical figure. Despite Atticus’s fall in Watchman, the figure of Atticus has undoubt- edly emboldened reform in the South and ennobled the legal profession. Harper Lee abandoned her study of the law to move to New York, but she never abandoned the primacy of the law in her novels. The one firm link between Watchman and Mockingbird is Lee’s faith in the law as an instrument of social justice. She articulated one of the law’s greatest achievements and one of its greatest challenges in Atticus’s closing argument to the jury in To Kill a Mockingbird: “Our courts 1 Associate Professor of English and Law, Samford University, Cumberland School of Law. B.A. Journalism and English, M.A. English, J.D., University of Alabama; Ph.D. English, University of North Carolina. 1-INTRODUCTION.BAGGETT.DOCX (DO NOT DELETE) 1/14/2017 11:46 AM 2 CUMBERLAND LAW REVIEW [Vol. 47:1 have their faults, as does any human institution, but in this country our courts are the great levelers, and in our courts, all men are created equal.” In Birmingham and in Alabama, the crucible of the Civil Rights Movement, a study of Harper Lee’s works is even more obligatory. Her father, Amasa Lee, was a respected member of the Alabama Bar Asso- ciation in Monroeville. His sister Alice, who died in November 2014 at age 103, was the first woman member of the Alabama bar. In 1997, the bar erected an Atticus Finch Monument in a courtyard outside the famous courthouse. Its inscription concludes: Children are the original and universal people of the world; it is only when they are educated into hatreds and depravities that children become the bigots, the cynics, the greedy, and the intolerant, and it is then that “there hath passed away a glory from the earth.” Atticus Finch challenges the legal profession to shift the paradigm and make the child the father of the man in dealing with the basic conflicts and struggles that permeate moral existence. Symbolically, it is the legal profession that now sits in the jury box as Atticus Finch concludes his argument to the jury; “In the name of God, do your duty.”2 The articles in this volume answer the challenge by trying to assess Harper Lee’s legacy and its implications for the legal profession. 2 HARPER LEE, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD 233 (1960). 2-BAGGETT FINAL.DOCX (DO NOT DELETE) 1/15/2017 4:45 PM ARTICLES “TUMBLING OUT OF THE BEAUTIFUL DREAM”: GO SET A WATCHMAN AND HARPER LEE’S LEGACY J. MARK BAGGETT1 On July 14, 2015, Harper Lee published her novel Go Set a Watch- man, the prequel to To Kill a Mockingbird. Overnight, Southerners suf- fered another disillusionment on their passage through modernity: Scout becomes Jean Louise; Atticus becomes a frail, 72-year-old segregationist who plots to undermine the Brown v. Board of Education2 decision of 1954; and Lee becomes Ta-Nehisi Coates.3 To compound the injury, six months later, on February 19, 2016, Lee died at age 89 in a Monroeville assisted-living facility.4 Like the famous courtroom scene in To Kill a Mockingbird, the public has now stood and paid its respects to Harper Lee’s passing. She bequeathed the public one of the greatest American novels and another sibling novel that threatened to alienate her devoted readers and stain her legacy. But she left questions unanswered, such as whether she intended for Watchman to be published and why she wrote this version of her father first. Now, as the perspective of her life and her two novels lengthens, we can begin to sort through the outlines of her legacy. For many Southerners, the polarized characterizations of Atticus in the two books will never be reconciled. For literary critics, the pub- lication of a “rough draft” that is uneven, digressive, and pedantic raised ethical questions and muddied Lee’s literary reputation. For lawyers, the iconic character of Atticus Finch, whose moral courage towered like Gregory Peck’s Oscar over the wasteland of Southern big- otry, now has clay feet. But these legacies seem almost frivolous in the 1 Associate Professor of English and Law, Samford University, Cumberland School of Law. B.A. Journalism and English, M.A. English, J.D., University of Alabama; Ph.D. English, University of North Carolina. 2 Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). 3 THE ATLANTIC, http://www.theatlantic.com/author/ta-nehisi-coates/ (last visited Oct. 27, 2016). Coates is a national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues. See id. Coates is also the author of Between the World and Me, published on the same day as Go Set A Watchman. See Coates, infra note 54. 4 Ryan Parker & Erik Hayden, “To Kill a Mockingbird Author Harper Lee Dies at 89,” THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER, (Feb. 19, 2016), http://www.hollywoodre- porter.com/news/harper-lee-dead-kill-a-867573. 2-BAGGETT FINAL.DOCX (DO NOT DELETE) 1/15/2017 4:45 PM 4 CUMBERLAND LAW REVIEW [Vol. 47:1 face of a nation nearly as bitterly divided on race as it was in the 1960s. Go Set a Watchman is Harper Lee’s Why We Can’t Wait.5 In raging against the corruption of Maycomb and her father’s betrayal, she re- news Frederick Douglass’s and W.E.B. Dubois’s age-old prophecy: The problem of the Twentieth Century, and now the Twenty-First Cen- tury, is “the problem of the color-line.”6 Although it is a flawed novel, Watchman’s message seems more prescient than Mockingbird’s un- stated premise that decency and empathy will triumph in due time. For half a century, Southerners have appropriated Atticus as the mirror image of their better selves. The model of Southern moral rec- titude, articulating a progressive, liberating vision of social justice, allowed Southerners of successive generations to latch on to Atticus’s moral authority and even to extricate their guilt. The fact that Atticus Finch’s closing arguments were destined to fail in the 1950s and 1960s enhanced the vision because Southerners who fancied themselves progressive now became co-victims with African-Americans against a common enemy. The symbol of this heroic defender of racial justice allowed them to claim a noble heritage and celebrate their part in racial progress, while ignoring the links to their true heritage of slavery and racism. The fact that Lee’s fictional Atticus was drawn from her father’s life authenticated these claims. Even black leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. affirmed the portrait of Atticus: “To the Negro in 1963, as to Atticus Finch, it had become obvious that nonviolence could sym- bolize the gold badge of heroism rather than the white feather of cow- ardice.”7 Amasa Lee’s death in 1962, so soon after Mockingbird was published and before the filming of the movie was over, kept his own legacy alive. Only recently has the public learned the truth that has been suspected all along: Amasa Lee was a defender of the segregationist status quo but changed his views before his death.8 Thus, the Atticus of Go Set a Watchman, which lay in a manuscript in a safety deposit box for almost 60 years, eventually proved more authentic than the Atticus of Mockingbird. Nevertheless, in terms of our regional self- delusion, there is no power like literary fiction. To benchmark Lee’s evolving legacy, it is worth noting that when 5 MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., WHY WE CAN’T WAIT 1 (1963). King’s chronicle of the Civil Rights Movement and what he calls “the Negro Revolution,” focusing on the cam- paign in Birmingham in 1963 and including “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” 6 See W.E.B. DU BOIS, THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK (1903). 7 MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., supra note 5, at 28. 8 See Jennifer Maloney & Laura Stevens, Harper Lee’s Father, Inspiration for Atticus Finch, Changed His Views on Segregation, WALL.

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