Constitution Check: Will Harper Lee lead the nation’s conversation about race, again?

In July 2015, National Constitution Center constitutional literacy adviser Lyle Denniston wrote  about how Harper Lee's last book could contribute to the current dialogue about race. On the occasion of Lee's passing today at the age of 89, we are republishing his column.

THE STATEMENTS AT ISSUE:

“Racism, inequality and the persecution of minorities in the United States have again surfaced in the national conversation. Last week, the South Carolina legislature took down the Confederate battle flag from its statehouse grounds after days of emotional debate. Protests have erupted around the country after police shootings of unarmed black men. [Harper Lee’s novel, ‘Go Set a Watchman,’ being published Tuesday], which was completed in 1957, is landing in the middle of the debate, like a literary artifact out of a time capsule from a period when the country was divided over many of the same issues.”

– New York Times reporter Alexandra Alter, in a front-page story on July 12, 2015, discussing the potential cultural impact of the recently discovered other work of Harper Lee – one in which Atticus Fitch, the civil rights hero of her famous novel “To Kill a Mockingbird,” is revealed in later life to be a committed racist who lectures his grown daughter Scout against the perils of integration.

“We all witnessed the people of Charleston and the people of South Carolina come together in a respectful way to deal with, frankly, what was a very horrific crime and a difficult issue about the Confederate flag. I actually think it’s time for some adults here in the Congress to sit down and have a conversation about how to address this issue.”

– Speaker of the House John Boehner, Ohio Republican, in remarks to news reporters on July 9, after an emotional debate in his chamber about the display of the Confederate flag in cemeteries managed by the federal government.

“More than 3,000 people have signed online petitions calling for a change in the name of Jefferson Davis Highway in Virginia, buoyed by growing national scrutiny of the Confederate flag and other symbols of the vanquished South…The issue is being discussed among Northern Virginia lawmakers, who acknowledge the challenge of trying to change long-standing markers and memorials…The Sons of Confederate Veterans are fighting [Virginia Gov. Terry] McAuliffe’s order to remove the Confederate flag from specialty license plates. ‘It’s cultural genocide,’ said Frank Earnest, past commander of the group’s Virginia division.”

– Washington Post reporter Patricia Sullivan, in a story on July 10 about one state’s reaction to the display of Confederate symbols.

WE CHECKED THE CONSTITUTON, AND…

At least since the Founders at the Philadelphia Convention fudged on the issue of slavery in a bid to keep their Southern brethren from boycotting the new Constitution and the coming Union, America has had difficulty talking openly about race, even though it seems ever-present in the public mind of this broadly diverse country.

Right now, the nation is struggling to talk about iconic symbols of the country’s racial history, and that is something of a new beginning. The Supreme Court itself recently joined in that conversation, allowing the state of Texas to refuse to permit a Confederate flag on a specialty license plate, finding in that no violation of the First Amendment rights of those seeking to remember the Confederate war dead.

The conversation has grown more anguished in the wake of the murders of nine black people in a Charleston church by a young white man who found inspiration in the story and the battle flag of the Confederacy. There seems to be a rush, in many places across the country, to do away with Confederate symbols, of all kinds, as if to cleanse the public square. Those symbols speak now as they long have to dueling meanings – hatred vs. heritage.

And into the center of this cultural clash, quite coincidentally, comes the figurative presence of one of America’s most revered novelists – Harper Lee.   In the 1960s, she used fiction to teach the redeeming virtue of racial tolerance to a nation working its way through the civil rights revolution. That novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” was so widely read – and still is – that its core message echoes and re-echoes across the nation.

With Ms. Lee herself remaining reclusively off the public stage, her publisher, HarperCollins, on Tuesday is bringing out the novel that she wrote first, before “Mockingbird,” before her publisher told her to do a rewrite, which became “Mockingbird.”

Now, that predecessor, “Go Set a Watchman,” awaits a mad rush of readers to the bookstores.

Fiction, especially if it becomes very popular, is quite as capable as living history in the creation of icons. Thank, for example, of the works of Mark Twain. What else but iconic has been that kind and generous figure in “Mockingbird,” Atticus Finch?

But what, the reading public will surely ask, has become of Atticus Fitch in the newly published “Watchman”?   A book review for The New York Times by Michico Kakutani describes the dilemma: “The depiction of Atticus in ‘Watchman’ makes for disturbing reading, and for ‘Mockingbird’ fans, it’s especially disorienting.”

Is it the height of literary license, or marketing potential, for the publisher, HarperCollins, to now allow the image of Atticus to be forever sullied? At one level, to be sure, that is what the First Amendment allows. Recall that the Supreme Court, speaking in the 1960s in a case that was all about racial tension, said that the country had always had “a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.”

In post-Charleston America, with its anxious and even angry focus on the current meaning of icons and symbols, Harper Lee’s alternative image of Atticus may well make the national conversation even more painful.

But there may yet be something more positive in this. Charles J. Shields, the author of the book, “Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee,” was quoted in The New York Times last week this way: “We could turn this into a plus in our national conversation about racism and the Confederate flag. It turns out that Atticus is no saint, as none of us are, but a man with prejudices.”