My Father and Atticus Finch Read Online Free

stories I heard about my father’s law practice in those Depression years concerned his battles with the banks. Their determination to foreclose on homes and farms in Crenshawand Coffee counties was “the most frightening thing happening . . . The man of the house was humiliated. Young people were fearful they would never be able to get a job. The government . . . advocated loans to big corporations and railroads with the idea that it would trickle down to the masses, but these companies used the money to help their desperate financial affairs and unemployment grew, breadlines grew longer and gloom settled over the land. Then Roosevelt was elected and there was the New Deal.”
    F OSTER B ECK was a lifelong Democrat. He was also a racial progressive, at least by the standards of the times. I distinctly remember him taking me aside when he got home from work—by then we lived in Montgomery—on the day in 1954 that the U.S. Supreme Court decided the school desegregation case. “Son,” he said, “The court was right to decide it this way. There will be some high talk, but you are not to engage in it.”
    He was right about the high talk. It was after that Supreme Court decision that the worst white Alabamians began openly speaking of their hatred for “niggers,” and even some white moderates flew Confederate battle flags and demanded the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren. Many Americans remember what followed: the bombing of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Montgomery home, the savage beatings of the Freedom Riders at the bus station in Montgomery, the rise of George Wallace. In view of the climate of fear in those days, it is perhaps understandable that my father, to my knowledge, did not often talk publicly about his controversial defense of a black-on-white rape case fifteen years earlier in a small town eighty-five miles southeast of Montgomery.
    Nevertheless, he took stances involving race that made animpression on me. For example, I remember, as a twelve-year-old boy, sitting where I had been told to sit, on a flour bin in the kitchen behind a closed swing door, and overhearing him angrily reprimand a newspaper reporter in the next room for his ugly remark about the “all-nigger choir” that had been asked to sing at Mr. M. L.’s funeral in Glenwood. Another time, when I was eleven, he took me to a Montgomery Rebels baseball game in which the first black players in our league would be playing for the visiting Jacksonville Braves. There were predictions of violence at the baseball field and some nasty shouts—I could hear them easily because we sat on the third base side, right behind the Jacksonville dugout, to show our support for the black players—and the taunts grew louder when a black player came out of the dugout and stood in the on-deck circle, then moved to the plate. The home crowd eventually fell silent after one of the black men got two hits, one a double that rattled the scoreboard. I remember my father saying, after the game, “Son, I don’t think we will get to see him next year in Montgomery,” and sure enough, Hank Aaron was called up to the Milwaukee Braves for the next season.
    The racial tension at the ball field that day in Montgomery would not have been new to my father, and I wonder if it took him back to his first meeting with Charles White, Alias, in Kilby prison, where he was being held, pending trial, for his safety. Unlike when Mr. White testified in court, no stenographer was present to record their words at Kilby prison, so I have to surmise what was said from what eventually transpired and from what I remember my father telling me about that meeting. Suffice it to say, the demanding man defended by my father was not at all like the deferential Tom Robinson represented by Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird.

   Chapter 5
    T HE AIR in the Negro ward at Kilby was damp from years of plumbing leaks,