Revisiting the Deep South in “To
Kill A Mockingbird”
By Merri Rosenberg
From our vantage point in 2006,
it’s sometimes easy
to forget exactly how pervasive and pernicious racism was at
earlier, more shameful moments in our history.
The 1962 movie, “To Kill a Mockingbird”–based
on Harper Lee’s novel, set in a small Alabama town in
the 1930s– hauntingly evokes that time and place, indelibly
capturing in nuanced images and restrained dialogue the cruel
banalities of racism .
As Atticus Finch, a decent and honorable white Southerner
who undertakes the doomed responsibility of defending an equally
decent and honorable black farmer, Tom Robinson, who is falsely
accused of raping a white woman, Gregory Peck offers a heart-breaking
performance of someone who will do the right thing no matter
what the personal cost to himself and his family.
Never mind that there is no evidence, no real case against
Robinson. All that matters, in the community and in the court
room, is that an impenetrable barrier between the races allegedly
has been breached.
The film contrasts the dignity of
many of the town’s
black residents, whether they are ministers, domestics or laborers,
with the distasteful behavior of the “white trash” elements,
whose precarious superiority to the blacks among whom they
live and work depends on the persistence of institutional and
cultural racism.
Played out against the tragedy of
Tom Robinson’s fate
is the story of Atticus’s two motherless children, Jem
and Scout ( “Jean Louise”), who, in their innocence,
don’t understand the injustices they witness and whose
questioning of their elders’ assumptions throws in sharp
relief many of the degradations of the Jim Crow system. In
one harrowing scene, Atticus has gone to the local jail to
protect Robinson from a mob bent on administering their own
brutal justice. Watching the scene unfold as Atticus, glasses
perched atop his nose, calmly continues to read even as a restless
crowd gathers, with the arrival of his children whose conversations
with some of their neighbors ultimately disperses the mob,
is almost unbearably dramatic.
This is one of those classic movies that fully deserves the
accolades, attention and awards it has received through the
years. Its very specificity, rooted in the time and mores of
the 1930s Deep South, is exactly what makes its message so
universal.#
