Atticus Finch, Race, Justice & Literature

Harper Lee has in the past said she would never publish another novel.  

I always viewed her as the author who had the proverbial one great book in him or her, wrote the book, and in good conscience decided not to "cash in" on the book's success.  And why should she have published another novel?  Mockingbird is a universally recognized classic, still making her a steady income (according to court papers relating to a lawsuit against her former book agent, she received $1,688,064.68 in royalties in the first six months of 2009 -- that's $9,249 per day), and she was never likely to write anything that would be as good.  Her decision showed integrity and a certain complacency with who she was.

Her philosophy seemed to be:  wallow in the glory of one great book, without muddying the waters with second-rate follow-ups.

This all changed with the publication of Go Set a Watchman.

The circumstances under which the novel was published are interesting and raise concerns about whether it really has been her decision to publish the novel.

Also, newsworthy was the much-publicized fact that Atticus Finch is portrayed as a racist.

Atticus Finch, whose film character was voted by the American Film Institute (AFI) as the greatest film hero in the history of film (other heroes in the top ten, for your curiosity:  Indiana Jones (number 2), James Bond (number 3), Rick Blaine (number 4) from Casablanca, Clarice Starling (number 6) from The Silence of the Lambs, Rocky Balboa (number 7), and Ellen Ripley (number 8) from Aliens).  I would imagine if there was a poll of greatest 20th century heroes in literature, he would also be number one or at the top of the list there, too.

When non-black America thinks of the great books of social justice in the 20th century, To Kill a Mockingbird is likely to be on any short list.  This is probably because it is reasonably brief and easy to read, as well as being well written and featuring a heroic, semi-mythical white man.  (The fact that a great movie was made from the book also doesn't hurt).  But there are many other books of more serious literary provenance written by African-Americans that should be at the top of the list, to name just a few, Black Boy, Native SonThe Invisible Man, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, several books by James Baldwin, The Color Purple, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and just about anything by Nobel Prize-winning Toni Morrison, but especially her masterpiece, Beloved, none of which have received as much cultural acceptance as Mockingbird.

Lee's novel has a slightly saccharine taste and, being written by a white Southern woman, perhaps also has a patronizing tone. 

In any event, I have always loved the book and movie.  Like many lawyers, I want to be like Gregory Peck-Atticus Finch, meaning someone who is not showy, or overly standoffish, but who does the right thing, even in the face of social pressure and personal danger.  Lawyers are hated because they are viewed as making a lot of money and looking down on their clients, which is some times true.  But lawyers have also made real and positive changes to our society, and Atticus Finch has always stood as someone worthy of emulation, even though he is unsuccessful in his attempt to gain Tom Robinson's freedom (interestingly, in Watchman, Robinson is acquited).

What does it mean to find out that as an old man, he too was a racist?  Was he also a racist at the time of Mockingbird, but he was portrayed as viewed through rose colored glasses by an adoring daughter, who kept the ugly parts out of sight, or perhaps he truly was noble and right-minded at the time of Mockingbird, but had somehow changed over the intervening years.  Perhaps both portrayals are "true," in that in a racist society, racism colors everyone's views of race, and everyone (even basically good people) ends up adopting racist views to some degree.  Racism even effects our basic and everyday language.  As Martin Luther King said,



Watchman is at the top of the best seller list and has garnered a remarkable amount of publicity, some of which I will cover below.

Also, since we are on the topic of literature, I will look at some of the great literary expressions of racial justice, by authors such as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Amiri Baraka.

What Was Harper Lee Thinking, or - Where Have You Gone Atticus Finch?

To start with, Atticus as we remember him, with his Gregory Peck good looks and unprepossessing, old fashioned glasses, saying things like:



"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand.  It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. Y ou rarely win, but sometimes you do."


What a good man.

And now, the Atticus of Go Set a Watchman:


"The Negroes down here are still in their childhood as people." 

"Scout, you probably don’t know it, but the NAACP-paid lawyers are standing around like buzzards down here waiting for things like this to happen….  We’ve got three or four in the state now.  They’re mostly in Birmingham and places like that, but circuit by circuit they watch and wait, just for some felony committed by a Negro agains a white person—you’d be surprised how quick they find out—in they come and… well, in terms you can understand, they demand Negroes on the juries in such cases.  They subpoena the jury commissioners, they ask the judge to step down, they raise every legal trick in their books—and they have ’em plenty—they try to force the judge into error.  Above all else, they try to get the case into a Federal court where they know the cards are stacked in their favor.  It’s already happening in our next-door-neighbor circuit, and there’s nothing in the books that says it won’t happen here."

Certainly less inspiring...

How do we reconcile Gregory Peck with the above quotes?  One explanation is that the two were never intended to co-exist.  It appears that Go Set a Watchman was the first draft of what later became To Kill a Mockingbird, which was heavily edited by legendary editor and friend, Tay Hohoff.  Because of the heavy involvement of Hohoff, there always was some speculation that one reason that Lee would never write another novel was because she didn't completely write Mockingbird on her own - Hohoff was not just an editor, but rather a collaborator.  The Invisible Hand Behind Harper Lee's 'To Kill a Mockingbird' details the relationship between Lee and Hohoff.

Some have also argued that there is value in the nuanced character:

After the initial shock, some writers and literary critics see added value in a more complex, and flawed, version of Atticus.  If “Mockingbird” sugarcoats racial divisions by depicting a white man as the model for justice in an unjust world, then “Watchman” may be like bitter medicine that more accurately reflects the times.

“If Atticus Finch is not quite the plaster saint that he is in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ there could be something rich and fascinating about that,” said Thomas Mallon, a novelist and critic, who had read only the published excerpt from “Watchman.”  “The moral certainties in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ are apparent from the first page, and in that sense, I don’t think it’s a great novel that deals with the tormenting questions of race in America, but maybe this new one is, if it’s more nuanced.”

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.

“Watchman,” 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.

“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,” said Charles J. Shields, author of “Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee.”  ....

“‘Go Set a Watchman’ is much more forcefully about civil rights.  It’s much more political, but that tells us what was in front of Harper Lee’s brain at the time,” said Mary McDonagh Murphy, a filmmaker who recently released a new version of “Hey, Boo,” her documentary about Harper Lee.  When she submitted the novel nearly 60 years ago, Ms. Lee was told to rewrite the book from young Scout’s perspective and to turn it into a coming-of-age story.  “My editor, who was taken by the flashbacks to Scout’s childhood, persuaded me to write a novel from the point of view of the young Scout,” Ms. Lee said in a statement.  “I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told,” Ms. Lee said in a statement that was released by her publisher in February.

Ms. Lee wrote “Watchman” when, like Jean Louise, she was living in New York and occasionally traveling home to Alabama to visit her aging father, the lawyer A. C. Lee, who is commonly cited as the model for Atticus in “Mockingbird.”  In letters she wrote at the time to a friend in New York, she describes feeling unmoored by his physical decline and impending death (“I found myself staring at his handsome old face, and a sudden wave of panic flashed through me”).

She also recounts feeling like an outsider in her hometown because of her stance on civil rights: “I don’t trust myself to keep my mouth shut if I feel moved to express myself, thereon it will get out all over Monroeville that I am a member of the N.A.A.C.P., which, God forbid. They already suspect this to be a fact anyway.”


Lee Siegel in the New Yorker wrote in February 2015, even before the books publication, and without knowledge that Atticus would be portrayed as racist:

It’s understandable, of course, to feel protective toward the author of a book that has cherished status in the imaginations of so many people.  Appearing in 1960, in the roiling dawn of the civil-rights movement, “Mockingbird” was the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” of its day.  Its central black character even bore the name Tom, and, just as Stowe’s character saves a white girl from drowning, Lee’s Tom Robinson helps a lonely, impoverished white girl with her errands because he pities her. It is intolerable to think that figures of authority—Lee’s lawyer, her publisher, and all those who stand to gain from a sequel to the phenomenally lucrative “Mockingbird”—might be manipulating and exploiting the creator of a work of art that itself is about how an official mendacity abets a system of inequality.  That the aged and infirm Lee either cannot or will not speak publicly about the sequel has only reinforced the suspicion of shady doings.

Yet beyond the social context, and even if people’s darkest fears are confirmed, it’s hard to see what harm the publication of the book, somewhat oddly titled “Go Set a Watchman,” would do.  If the novel is inferior to “Mockingbird,” Lee’s classic of American literature will not suffer.  William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” was not invalidated by the deservedly forgotten “Pylon.”  The posthumous publication of Ralph Ellison’s disappointing “Juneteenth”—reorganized by one of Ellison’s friends—has not diminished the power or importance of “Invisible Man.”  Like those other works, “Mockingbird” has created its own inviolable space; the sudden appearance of a second-rate work from Lee would hardly discredit the book that made her famous in the first place.  The worst that could happen would be for a mediocre “Watchman” to make it seem that “Mockingbird” was a fluke.  In that case, “Mockingbird” would be all the more remarkable.

Toward the end of his life, Willem de Kooning, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, was declared mentally unfit to manage his estate, and his executors began to sell off at high prices a stream of works that many critics considered greatly inferior to de Kooning’s earlier work.  Their fears were similar to those aroused by the announcement of “Watchman” ’s publication.  De Kooning’s value as an artist—not to mention the monetary value of his art—has not been tainted in the slightest degree.

But perhaps the comparisons to de Kooning, and to Faulkner and Ellison, are overblown.  Perhaps the more apt comparison would be to novelists like Pearl S. Buck and James Michener, writers who once occupied a now defunct space somewhere between literary and popular fiction.  Though “Mockingbird” won a Pulitzer Prize, like Buck’s “The Good Earth,” it is not typically considered part of the “serious” canon of literature.  It might seem insulting to call a beloved book like “Mockingbird” middlebrow, but such works—“Gentleman’s Agreement,” “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” “Exodus,” and “Fear of Flying,” to give a few examples—are the ones that shape public consciousness.  If you concede that Lee’s book belongs in that category, then the publication of an inferior sequel would be nothing new.  With such a book, what matters more than the style and sensibility of the author is that it crystallizes its moment.  Considered in this light, “Mockingbird” is not primarily a work in Harper Lee’s oeuvre, so to speak.  Rather, the author is a footnote to her achievement, a humbling fact that may even help account for Lee’s near-reclusiveness.

That an inferior sequel would not have the power to undermine the status of “Mockingbird” seems fairly obvious, particularly given that the so-called sequel was actually written before “Mockingbird.”  But the uproar over “Watchman” doesn’t seem to be subsiding, even as “Watchman” itself remains shielded from public view.  On the face of it, the situation seems absurd, yet there are cultural currents afoot, beyond the book’s iconic power as a social document, that give the absurd situation a rational aspect and keep it going.  One is the fear of the helplessness of old age.  Lee, who is eighty-eight years old, has no family to protect her.  She is relying, truly, on the kindness of friends who could well be behaving like strangers now that large amounts of money are at stake.  The spectacle of an author—and a beloved American author at that, one who has abided in our deepest feelings since many of us read her in childhood—being taken advantage of in old age is chilling at a time when so many people are living long lives.  There is a collective anxiety about how we will survive as our faculties weaken, and as our existence becomes depopulated of friends and family and even familiar faces.

The ascendance of money as the dominant social value adds to the concern over Lee’s true situation.  In every corner of the culture, money has increasingly become the sole criterion of success.  Museums falter, dance companies close their doors, mid-list authors are cast adrift, newspapers and magazines contract, decent public servants are repelled from political life—all because they cannot meet an ever more draconian bottom line.  And here is the author of the great American novel of cruelty and decency, of racial hatred and the sympathy that blurs racial difference, perhaps being robbed and degraded, all for the sake of the almighty buck.  L’affaire “Watchman” is the perfect emblem of every cultivated person’s nightmare: the ongoing devaluation of art and literature in an impossibly overheated, aggressive, and exacting marketplace; and the callous trashing of the past.

Or is it?  The indignant outcry over the fate of “Watchman” could just as well prove the opposite.  It could mean that the very possibility of Lee’s distress possesses the power of her masterpiece.  Somewhere in the hysteria that has greeted news of the sequel there is an acute awareness of artistic value, of the past and of what we owe the past, and of an individual’s precious singularity.  When all the hysteria dies down, and those fine sentiments come to the fore, “Watchman” might well receive the same gift that Atticus Finch gave to Tom Robinson, and which Lee, in such a trivial context, once gave to me: the benefit of the doubt.

Another New Yorker article also deals with the circumstances of the book's publication and Lee's present circumstances.  According to the article, Lee lived in New York City (for some of the time in a rent controlled apartment on the Upper East Side) from 1949 until 2007, when a severe stroke brought her back to Monroeville, Alabama, where she was born.  She currently lives in an assisted-living facility.  

The article also discusses Lee's relationship with her attorney, Tonja Carter, who has a durable power of attorney and apparently was instrumental in bringing out Watchman.

Joe Nocera talks in an editorial about what he bluntly calls a "The Harper Lee 'Go Set a Watchman' Fraud":

[T]he Rupert Murdoch-owned publishing house HarperCollins announced just this week that it had sold more than 1.1 million copies in a week’s time, making it the “fastest-selling book in company history.”  “Watchman” has rocketed to the top of the New York Times best-seller list, where it will surely stay for a while.  And the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal not only excerpted the first chapter on the Friday before publication, but it also gave its readers a chance to win a signed first edition of the book.  Talk about synergy! ....





That’s issue No. 1.  Issue No. 2 is the question of whether “Go Set a Watchman” is, in fact, a “newly discovered” novel, worthy of the hoopla it has received, or whether it something less than that: a historical artifact or, more bluntly, a not-very-good first draft that eventually became, with a lot of hard work and smart editing, an American classic.

The Murdoch empire is insisting on the former, of course; that’s what you do when you’re hoping to sell millions of books in an effort to boost the bottom line.

But again, an alternative scenario suggests itself.  Lee has said that she wanted to write a “race novel.”  Though her first effort had some fine writing, like many first-time novelists she also made a lot of beginners’ mistakes: scenes that don’t always add up, speeches instead of dialogue, and so on.  So she took a character who was a racist in the first draft and turned him into the saintly lawyer Atticus Finch who stands up to his town’s bigotry in defending a black man.  He becomes the hero of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”  (Which is also why it’s silly to view the Atticus Finch of “Go Set a Watchman” as the same person as the Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” as many commentators have done.  Atticus is a fictional character, not a real person.)  Lee still wound up with a race novel, which was her goal.  But a different and much better one.

In one of her last interviews, conducted in 1964, Lee said: “I think the thing that I most deplore about American writing… is a lack of craftsmanship.  It comes right down to this — the lack of absolute love for language, the lack of sitting down and working a good idea into a gem of an idea.”

A publisher that cared about Harper Lee’s legacy would have taken those words to heart, and declined to publish “Go Set a Watchman,” the good idea that Lee eventually transformed into a gem.  That HarperCollins decided instead to manufacture a phony literary event isn’t surprising.  It’s just sad.

Below are selections form the New Yorker's cynical (but insightful) review of the book:
















As mentioned above in Joe Nocera's editorial, Rupert Murdoch owns the Wall Street Journal and HarperCollins (the publisher of the book), so it is not surprising that the Wall Street Journal should review the book more favorably and less cynically than other venues.  Below is the Wall Street Journal review, which provides an excellent summary of the book as well as a charitable assessment of the book's good points:

Although it is set in the mid-1950s, around 20 years after “To Kill a Mockingbird,” it is not a sequel....  Properly speaking, “Go Set a Watchman” is a practice run for “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and it existed before anybody could have known that small-town Alabama lawyer Atticus Finch would become a symbol of the nation’s moral conscience.

... “Go Set a Watchman” is a distressing book, one that delivers a startling rebuttal to the shining idealism of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” This story is of the toppling of idols; its major theme is disillusion. 

There’s little hint of darkness as the novel begins.  Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch,better known to us by her childhood nickname Scout, is returning to Maycomb, Ala., for a two-week vacation.  For the past five years, Jean Louise has been living in New York City trying to make it as a painter.  Her older brother Jem—I regret to report—has died of a heart attack.  But her father, Atticus, is still hanging on.  Seventy-two and suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, he is cared for by his priggish, busybody sister Alexandra.... 

“Go Set a Watchman” is told in the third person, but it stays close to Jean Louise’s perspective and contains the familiar pleasures of Ms. Lee’s writing—the easy, drawling rhythms, the flashes of insouciant humor, the love of anecdote.  The most charming early passages concern Jean Louise’s irreverent but affectionate depictions of life in Maycomb, where “if you did not want much, there was plenty.”  FDR’s New Deal brought the town its first paved street, Ms. Lee recounts, located by the schoolhouse and “resulting in skinned knees and cracked crania for the children and a proclamation from the principal that nobody was to play Pop-the-Whip on the pavement.  Thus the seeds of states’ rights were sown in the hearts of Jean Louise’s generation.”  Some of the flashbacks to the halcyon 1930s take up whole chapters and feel clumsily integrated, but it’s interesting to see the glimmerings of a Pulitzer Prize winner.  One brief reminiscence relates Atticus’s tireless defense of a black man falsely accused of rape—though in this telling his client is acquitted.

There’s no big, dramatic event like the Tom Robinson trial to motor “Go Set a Watchman.”  But the blight of racial strife is still the heart of the story.  Jean Louise’s visit takes place shortly after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision—“the Supreme Court’s bid for immortality,” as Atticus sarcastically calls it—and, like most of the South, the town is in upheaval over the prospect of enforced integration.  Jean Louise thinks little of it until she sees Henry and her father attending a meeting of the Maycomb County Citizens’ Council, where local whites convene to spew racist bile and organize resistance to the federal government.


Yes, that is correct: Atticus Finch, standard-bearer of justice and integrity and one of the few unambiguously heroic figures in American literature, was originally conceived as a segregationist.  Jean Louise can’t believe it either, and as her furious arguments with both Henry and Atticus unfurl—“You deny that they’re human,” she shouts at her father—the focus of the novel shifts from the issue of civil rights to the story of a young woman’s painfully evolving relationships with the men in her life.  Her discoveries make a future with Henry seem impossible.  More, they reduce Atticus from a god to “the status of a human being,” and she must find the courage to love him anyway, hypocrisies and all.

Readers will find themselves facing the same trouble.  On one hand, this abrupt redefinition of a famed fictional character is fascinating.  Atticus’s ideas about gradualism and states’ rights were commonplace in the midcentury South—a similar attitude is expressed in William Faulkner’s “Intruder in the Dust” (1948), for instance.  His provincial convictions and bigotries actually make him a truer, more representative figure than the bespectacled icon of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Yet for the millions who hold that novel dear, “Go Set a Watchman” will be a test of their tolerance and capacity for forgiveness.  At the peak of her outrage, Jean Louise tells her father, “You’ve cheated me in a way that’s inexpressible.”  I don’t doubt that many who read this novel are going to feel the same way.

Literary Views of Justice

To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the great novels on social justice; To Set a Watchman less so.

Amiri Baraka said, “Art is a weapon in the struggle of ideas."  He also said:


“The attempt to divide art and politics is a bourgeois which says good poetry, art, cannot be political, but since everything is… political, even an artist or work that claims not to have any politics is making a political statement by that act.”

In line with these thoughts, I will provide selections and quotes from great artists dealing with police brutality or other racial injustice (and I will end with several poems by Baraka).

Langston Hughes (1902-1967) wrote perhaps the most succinct and famous poem on racial injustice:


What happens to a dream deferred? 

      Does it dry up
      like a raisin in the sun? 
      Or fester like a sore— 
      And then run? 
      Does it stink like rotten meat? 
      Or crust and sugar over— 
      like a syrupy sweet?

      Maybe it just sags
      like a heavy load.

      Or does it explode?

Hughes also wrote two poems specifically about police brutality, both of which get posted frequently on prisoner websites:

Who But the Lord?

I looked and I saw
That man they call the Law.
He was coming
Down the street at me!
I had visions in my head
Of being laid out cold and dead,
Or else murdered
By the third degree.

I said, O, Lord, if you can,
Save me from that man!
Don’t let him make a pulp out of me!
But the Lord he was not quick.
The Law raised up his stick
And beat the living hell
Out of me!

Now, I do not understand
Why God don’t protect a man
From police brutality.
Being poor and black,
I’ve no weapon to strike back
So who but the Lord
Can protect me?

We’ll see.


Third Degree

Hit me!  Jab me!
Make me say I did it.
Blood on my sport shirt
And my tan suede shoes.

Faces like jack-o’-lanterns
In gray slouch hats.

Slug me! Beat me!
Scream jumps out
Like blow-torch.
Three kicks between the legs
That kill the kids
I’d make tomorrow.

Bars and floor skyrocket
And burst like Roman candles.

When you throw
Cold water on me,
I’ll sign the

Another of Hughes' most famous poems is "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," which doesn't overtly deal with racism, but hints at it with its references to the Nile, the Mississippi and New Orleans, all places where slavery was present.

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I've known rivers
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Countee Cullen (1903-1946), another great black poet, wrote the following poem dealing with racism in Baltimore, foreshadowing the tensions that came to the surface earlier this year with the death of Freddie Gray:


Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, "Nigger."

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember. 

Nikki Giovanni (1943-    ) wrote the following poem about an incident in which she and a Black Panther friend were harassed by a police officer.

Black Power (For all the beautiful Black Panthers East)

But the whole thing is a miracle - See?

We were just standing there
Talking - not touching or smoking
When this cop told
Move along buddy - take your whores
Outa here

And this tremendous growl
From out of nowhere
Pounced on him

Nobody to this very day
Can explain
How it happened

And none of the zoos or circuses
Within fifty miles
Had reported
A panther

Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), who was white, wrote the following poem about the notorious "Scottsboro Boys" cases, where nine African American teenagers were accused in Alabama of raping two white women on a train in 1931.  According to the wikipedia article, "The landmark set of legal cases from this incident dealt with racism and the right to a fair trial.  The cases included a lynch mob before the suspects had been indicted, a frameup, all-white juries, rushed trials, and disruptive mobs.  It is frequently cited as an example of an overall miscarriage of justice in the United States legal system."

The Trial

The South is green with coming spring; revival
flourishes in the fields of Alabama.  Spongy with rain,
plantations breathe April: carwheels suck mud in the roads,
the town expands warm in the afternoons.  At night the black boy
teeters no-handed on a bicycle, whistling The St. Louis Blues,
blood beating, and hot South.  A red brick courthouse
is vicious with men inviting death.  Array your judges; call your jurors; come,
here is your justice, come out of the crazy jail.
Grass is green now in Alabama; Birmingham dusks are quiet
relaxed and soft in the park, stern at the yards:
a hundred boxcars shunted off to sidings, and the hoboes
gathering grains of sleep in forbidden corners.
In all the yards: Atlanta, Chattanooga,
Memphis, and New Orleans, the cars, and no jobs.

Every night the mail-planes burrow the sky,
carrying postcards to laughing girls in Texas,
passionate letters to the Charleston virgins,
words through the South: and no reprieve,
no pardon, no release.
A blinded statue attends before the courthouse,
bronze and black men lie on the grass, waiting,
the khaki dapper National Guard leans on its bayonets.
But the air is populous beyond our vision:
all the people's anger finds its vortex here
as the mythic lips of justice open, and speak.

Hammers and sickles are carried in a wave of strength, fire-tipped,
swinging passionately ninefold to a shore.
Answer the back-thrown Negro face of the lynched, the flat forehead knotted,
the eyes showing a wild iris, the mouth a welter of blood,
answer the broken shoulders and these twisted arms.
John Brown, Nat Turner, Toussaint stand in this courtroom,
Dred Scott wrestles for freedom there in the dark corner,
all our celebrated shambles are repeated here: now again
Sacco and Vanzetti walk to a chair, to the straps and rivets
and the switch spitting death and Massachusetts' will.
Wreaths are brought out of history
here are the well-nourished flowers of France, grown strong on blood,
Caesar twisting his thin throat toward conquest,
turning north from the Roman laurels,
the Istrian galleys slide again to sea.
How they waded through bloody Godfrey's Jerusalem!
How the fires broke through Europe, and the rich
and the tall jails battened on revolution!
The fastidious Louis', cousins to the sun, stamping
those ribboned heels on Calas, on the people;
the lynched five thousand of America.
Tom Mooney from San Quentin, Herndon: here
is an army for audience
all resolved
to a gobbet of tobacco, spat, and the empanelled hundred,
a jury of vengeance, the cheap pressed lips, the narrow eyes like hardware;
the judge, his eye-sockets and cheeks dark and immutably secret,
the twisting mouth of the prosecuting attorney.

Nine dark boys spread their breasts against Alabama,
schooled in the cells, fathered by want.
—Mother: one writes: they treat us bad.  If they send
—us back to Kilby jail, I think I shall kill myself.
—I think I must hang myself by my overalls.

Alabama and the South are soft with spring;
in the North, the seasons change, sweet April, December and the air
loaded with snow.  There is time for meetings
during the years, they remaining in prison.
In the Square
a crowd listens, carrying banners.
Overhead, boring through the speaker's voice, a plane
circles with a snoring of motors revolving in the sky,
drowning the single voice.  It does not touch
the crowd's silence.  It circles.  The name stands:

In an online article, Mark Karlin writes about the "stark racial divisions in reactions to Ferguson police shooting" and quotes from black poet, Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000):


Yes, there are black males who have made it in the world of the white ruling elite, such as the president of the United States and the attorney general.  However, there are two major caveats to consider in this regard.

First, it is clear that even though Barack Obama has the academic pedigree, intellectual capabilities and irrepressible desire to accommodate whites by not pressing on the pedal of assisting African-Americans who have - as Eugene Robinson notes in a commentary on BuzzFlash today - been left behind, he is still vilified by a large segment of the white population in the United States because he is black. 

Second, the number of black men and women who have made it through the racial barrier, while significant, is miniscule in relation to the number of blacks (and other people of color) under siege by police and a criminal justice system that works on the principle of guilty until proven innocent for most non-whites.  This is why the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world.

Yes, there is a class issue in race bias, but the racist backlash to President Obama's presidency (symbolized most blatantly by the "birther" accusations that morphed into the war on "Obamacare") indicates that the white racial prejudice of thinking blacks more violent, more disinterested in working, more dangerous to society has long been - and still is - an institutionalized racism that permeates the US economic and criminal justice system....

As the events in Ferguson - joining a long list of daily acts of police-sanctioned racial brutality, harassment, arrests and murder - indicate, the racial gap in the United States about what constitutes justice and freedom is still as wide as the Grand Canyon.

The Pew Poll does raise a glimmer of hope in the wider recognition among young people - as compared to the older population - of the racial implications of the Mike Brown shooting:

By a wide margin (55% to 34%), adults under 30 think the shooting of the unarmed teen raises important issues about race.  Among those 65 and older, opinion is divided: 40% think the incident raises important racial issues while about as many (44%) think the issue of race is getting more attention than it deserves. 

That is a foundation to build upon in a moment of mourning, police militarization and racial rancor among those in the US who have been stigmatized, stalked by police and economically left behind, but only if ignorance is counteracted by an active uprising of social justice.

The poet Gwendolyn Brooks described in a famous lyric how truth is not always welcome.  It makes demands upon us to change, to encounter the uncomfortable.  Supposing, Brooks ponders, our lack of self-knowledge one day encounters the enlightenment provided by the shining clarity of the sun? 

Though we have wept for him,

Though we have prayed

All through the night-years—

What if we wake one shimmering morning to

Hear the fierce hammering

Of his firm knuckles

Hard on the door?

Brooks does not think we would welcome what we had so long sought:

Shall we not shudder?—

Shall we not flee

Into the shelter, the dear thick shelter

Of the familiar

Propitious haze?

Sweet is it, sweet is it

To sleep in the coolness

Of snug unawareness.

The murder of Mike Brown and the disastrous aftermath of police oppression in Ferguson, Missouri, reminds us all that we cannot continue as a union in a state of "snug unawareness" if we are to achieve the equality that is part of our national narrative, but is still parceled out with institutionalized racial selectivity.

Here is the complete poem, which does not obviously deal with race, but as the above article implies, the "darkness" can be interpreted as an unwillingness to deal with the ugliness of racism:


And if sun comes
How shall we greet him?
Shall we not dread him,
Shall we not fear him
After so lengthy a
Session with shade?
Though we have wept for him,
Though we have prayed
All through the night-years—
What if we wake one shimmering morning to
Hear the fierce hammering
Of his firm knuckles
Hard on the door?
Shall we not shudder?—
Shall we not flee
Into the shelter, the dear thick shelter
Of the familiar
Propitious haze?
Sweet is it, sweet is it
To sleep in the coolness
Of snug unawareness.
The dark hangs heavily
Over the eyes.

Richard Wright (1908-1960) who wrote the great novels, Black Boy and Native Son, also wrote the following two powerful poems.

I Have Seen Black Hands


I am black and I have seen black hands, millions and millions of them,
Out of millions of bundles of wool and flannel tiny black fingers have reached restlessly and hungrily for life.
Reached out for the black nipples at the black breasts of black mothers,
And they've held red, green, blue, yellow, orange, white, and purple toys in the childish grips of possession.
And chocolate drops, peppermint sticks, lollypops, wineballs, ice cream cones, and sugared cookies in fingers sticky and   gummy,
And they've held balls and bats and gloves and marbles and jack-knives and sling-shots and spinning tops in the thrill of sport and play.
And pennies and nickels and dimes and quarters and sometimes on New Year's, Easter, Lincoln's Birthday, May Day, a brand new green dollar bill,
They've held pens and rulers and maps and tablets and books in palms spotted and smeared with ink,
And they've held dice and cards and half-pink flasks and cue sticks and cigars and cigarettes in the pride of new maturity...


They were tired and awkward and calloused and grimy and covered with hangnails,
And they piled higher and higher the steel, iron, the lumber, wheat, rye, the oats, corn, the cotton, the wool, the oil, the coal, the meat, the fruit, the glass, and the stone until there was too much to be used,
And they grabbed guns and slung them on their shoulders and marched and groped in trenches and fought and killed and conquered nations who were customers for the goods black hands had made.
And again black hands stacked goods higher and higher until there was too much to be used,


Reaching hesitantly out of days of slow death for the goods they had made, but the bosses warned that the goods were private and did not belong to them,
And the black hands struck desperately out in defence of life and there was blood, but the enraged bosses decreed that this too was wrong,
And the black hands felt the cold steel bars of the prison they had made, in despair tested their strength and found that they could neither bend nor break them,
And the black hands fought and scratched and held back but a thousand white hands took them and tied them,
And the black hands lifted palms in mute and futile supplication to the sodden faces of mobs wild in the revelries of sadism,
And the black hands strained and clawed and struggled in vain at the noose that tightened about the black throat,
And the black hands waved and beat fearfully at the tall flames that cooked and charred the black flesh. . .


I am black and I have seen black hands
Raised in fits of revolt, side by side with the white fists of white workers,
And some day-and it is only this which sustains me
Some day there shall be millions and millions of them, 
On some red day in a burst of fists on a new horizon!


Between the World and Me 

And one morning while in the woods I stumbled
    suddenly upon the thing, 
Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly
    oaks and elms
And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting
    themselves between the world and me....

There was a design of white bones slumbering forgottenly
    upon a cushion of ashes. 
There was a charred stump of a sapling pointing a blunt
    finger accusingly at the sky. 
    a scorched coil of greasy hemp; 
    and a pair of trousers stiff with black blood. 
And upon the trampled grass were buttons, dead matches, 
    butt-ends of cigars and cigarettes, peanut shells, a
    drained gin-flask, and a whore's lipstick; 
Scattered traces of tar, restless arrays of feathers, and the
    lingering smell of gasoline. 
And through the morning air the sun poured yellow

And while I stood my mind was frozen within cold pity
    for the life that was gone. 
The ground gripped my feet and my heart was circled by
    icy walls of fear-- 
    grass and fumbled the leaves in the trees; the woods
    poured forth the hungry yelping of hounds; the
The dry bones stirred, rattled, lifted, melting themselves
    into my bones. 
The grey ashes formed flesh firm and black, entering into
    my flesh.

The gin-flask passed from mouth to mouth, cigars and
    cigarettes glowed, the whore smeared lipstick red
    upon her lips, 
And a thousand faces swirled around me, clamoring that
    my life be burned....

And then they had me, stripped me, battering my teeth
    into my throat till I swallowed my own blood. 
    black wet body slipped and rolled in their hands as
    they bound me to the sapling. 
And my skin clung to the bubbling hot tar, falling from
    me in limp patches. 
And the down and quills of the white feathers sank into
    my raw flesh, and I moaned in my agony. 
Then my blood was cooled mercifully, cooled by a
    baptism of gasoline. 
Panting, begging I clutched childlike, clutched to the hot
    sides of death. 
    yellow surprise at the sun....

There is a lengthy post on the Post 45 blog that discusses black author Richard Wright's views on law and the police, which are summarized in its first few paragraphs:

Toward the end of his life, after a long exile in France accompanied by intermittent harassment by American internal security agencies, Richard Wright was asked whether he felt reluctant when he had to recite the Pledge of Allegiance to renew his United States passport.  Wright's reply was without anguish: "I don't think it has caused me too much hardship.  I live quite comfortably.  In any case the American Negro is the most vociferous defender of the Constitution.  That's exactly what we want: enforcement of the Constitution."  

Wright, whose reply was almost guaranteed to appear in his ever-growing FBI file, may not have had much latitude in expressing a public opinion toward the Pledge.  But clearly, Wright thought past the interviewer's question, and past the Pledge itself, which makes no mention of the United States Constitution.  The deflection illustrates a familiar but fundamental aspect of postwar American culture: public controversy about questions of constitutionality and the role of the Supreme Court.  In the postwar period the Supreme Court wrought major cultural changes long overdue in American jurisprudence, delivering such watershed decisions as Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and Miranda v. Arizona (1966).  For Wright to have thought of constitutionality when reminded of the State Department's requirement that he recite the Pledge, suggests that the Court, in contrast to the executive or the legislature, represented what Wright thought of as the ideal version of American power, its friendliest, or its least autocratic, incarnation.  For Wright, the America to which he could pledge allegiance was a judicial America, one engaged in the process of living up to its Constitution.

However, when Wright imagines encounters with American law in fiction, he does not think of the highest courts.  Instead, his stories are consistently preoccupied with the most intensive and widely distributed form of state power, the police.  For Wright's protagonists, the police are always the state that can be seen, and what his characters see are rampant transgressions of constitutional principle.  Wright's characters were not alone in their fear of the police.  Over the course of Wright's lifetime, progressive reforms increasingly sought to stem police lawlessness, and a major national program of review, the "Wickersham Commission," was appointed by President Hoover in 1929 to study the problem.  The copious report established that the use of violent interrogation was widespread in police stations through the United States.  Public opinion recoiled from the thought of the rubber hose, the phone book to the head, and other forms of nonlethal torture, along with more insidious methods, including prolonged interrogation, isolation, and holding suspects without arraignment....  

Esquire Magazine in its July 1968 issue, published soon after the assassination of Martin Luther King, interviewed James Baldwin (1924-1987) about the state of race relations in the U.S.  Below is an extract:







In the below extract from an article in The Telegraph, Toni Morrison (1931-    ) discusses her views on race:



And there’s a particular view of racism, not hammered home but abundantly clear.  One of the protagonists becomes a postgraduate economics student because he finds the African-American Studies department fails to address a simple proposition: that “most of the real answers concerning slavery, lynching, forced labor, sharecropping, racism, Jim Crow, prison labor, migration, civil rights and black revolution movements were all about money.”




The following poem is by former poet laureate of the United States, Rita Dove (1952-    ).  She was inspired by George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the shooting death of unarmed African-American teen Trayvon Martin.

Trayvon, Redux


-- William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, that Greeny Flower”

Move along, you don't belong here.
This is what you're thinking.  Thinking
drives you nuts these days, all that
talk about rights and law abidance when
you can't even walk your own neighborhood
in peace and quiet, get your black ass gone.
You're thinking again.  Then what?
Matlock's on TV and here you are,
vigilant, weary, exposed to the elements
on a wet winter's evening in Florida
when all's not right but no one sees it.
Where are they – the law, the enforcers
blind as a bunch of lazy bats can be,
holsters dangling from coat hooks above their desks
as they jaw the news between donuts?

Hey!  It tastes good, shoving your voice
down a throat thinking only of sweetness.
Go on, choke on that.  Did you say something?
Are you thinking again?  Stop! – and
get your ass gone, your blackness,
that casual little red riding hood
I'm just on my way home attitude
as if this street was his to walk on.
Do you do hear me talking to you?  Boy. 
How dare he smile, jiggling his goodies
in that tiny shiny bag, his black paw crinkling it,
how dare he tinkle their laughter at you.

Here's a fine basket of riddles: 
If a mouth shoots off and no one's around
to hear it, who can say which came first –
push or shove, bang or whimper?
Which is news fit to write home about? 

I quoted from Amiri Baraka (1934-2014) at the beginning of this post.  He is an interesting, if at times antagonistic, artist, whose life is summarized by the New York Times obituary last year:










Turn it backwards/see, see what I mean?

An evol word. & besides

who understands it?


Saturday mornings we listened to Red Lantern & his undersea folk.








He joined the Air Force.



























Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed

Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers

To stay home that day

Why did Sharon stay away?














Some poems that show Baraka's lyricism, as well as his provocative nature:

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note

Lately, I've become accustomed to the way
The ground opens up and envelopes me
Each time I go out to walk the dog.
Or the broad edged silly music the wind
Makes when I run for a bus...

Things have come to that.

And now, each night I count the stars.
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.

Nobody sings anymore.

And then last night I tiptoed up
To my daughter's room and heard her
Talking to someone, and when I opened
The door, there was no one there...
Only she on her knees, peeking into

Her own clasped hands


In Memory of Radio

The rest of you probably had on WCBS and Kate Smith,
Or something equally unattractive.)

What can I say?
It is better to haved loved and lost
Than to put linoleum in your living rooms?

Am I a sage or something?
Mandrake's hypnotic gesture of the week?

& love is an evil word.
Turn it backwards/see, see what I mean?
An evol word. & besides
who understands it?

At 11, Let's Pretend
& we did
& I, the poet, still do.  Thank God!


O, yes he does
O, yes he does
An evil word it is,
This Love.


Notes For a Speech

African blues
does not know me. Their steps, in sands
of their own
land.  A country
in black & white, newspapers
blown down pavements
of the world.  Does
not feel
what I am.


in the dream, an oblique
suckling of nerve, the wind
throws up sand, eyes
are something locked in
hate, of hate, of hate, to
walk abroad, they conduct
their deaths apart
from my own.  Those
heads, I call
my "people."

(And who are they.  People.  To concern

myself, ugly man.  Who
you, to concern
the white flat stomachs
of maidens, inside houses
dying.  Black.  Peeled moon
light on my fingers
move under
her clothes.  Where
is her husband.  Black
words throw up sand
to eyes, fingers of
their private dead.  Whose
soul, eyes, in sand.  My color
is not theirs.  Lighter, white man
talk.  They shy away.  My own
dead souls, my, so called
people.  Africa
is a foreign place.  You are
as any other sad man here



"A closed window looks down
on a dirty courtyard, and Black people
call across or scream across or walk across
defying physics in the stream of their will. 

Our world is full of sound
Our world is more lovely than anyone's
tho we suffer, and kill each other
and sometimes fail to walk the air. 

We are beautiful people
With African imaginations
full of masks and dances and swelling chants
with African eyes, and noses, and arms
tho we sprawl in gray chains in a place
full of winters, when what we want is sun. 

We have been captured,
and we labor to make our getaway, into
the ancient image; into a new

Correspondence with ourselves
and our Black family.  We need magic
now we need the spells, to raise up
return, destroy, and create.  What will be

the sacred word?


Short Speech To My Friends

A political art, let it be
tenderness, low strings the fingers
touch, or the width of autumn
climbing wider avenues, among the virtue
and dignity of knowing what city
you’re in, who to talk to, what clothes
—even what buttons—to wear.  I address
                                                                        / the society
                                                                        the image, of
                                                                        common utopia.
                                                                        / The perversity
                                                                        of separation, isolation,
after so many years of trying to enter their kingdoms,
now they suffer in tears, these others, saxophones whining
through the wooden doors of their less than gracious homes.
The poor have become our creators.  The black.  The thoroughly
                  Let the combination of morality
and inhumanity

Is power, the enemy?  (Destroyer
of dawns, cool flesh of valentines, among
the radios, pauses, drunks
of the 19th century.  I see it,
as any man's single history.  All the possible heroes
dead from heat exhaustion
                                                   at the beach
                                                   or hiding for years from cameras
only to die cheaply in the pages
of our daily lie.
                             One hero
has pretensions toward literature
one toward the cultivation of errors, arrogance,
and constantly changing disguises, as trucker, boxer,
to those speedy heroines of masturbation or kicking literal evil
continually down filmy public stairs.
A compromise
would be silence.  To shut up, even such risk
as the proper placement
of verbs and nouns.  To freeze the spit
in mid-air, as it aims itself
at some valiant intellectual's face.
There would be someone
who would understand, for whatever
fancy reason.  Dead, lying, Roi, as your children
cane up, would also rise.  As George Armstrong Custer
these 100 years, has never made
a mistake.


Monday in B-Flat

I can pray
    all day
    & God
    wont come.

But if I call
        The Devil
            Be here

        in a minute! 


Wise I

    WHYS (Nobody Knows
    The Trouble I Seen)

If you ever find
yourself, some where
lost and surrounded
by enemies
who won't let you
speak in your own language
who destroy your statues
& instruments, who ban
your omm bomm ba boom
then you are in trouble
deep trouble
they ban your
own boom ba boom
you in deep deep


probably take you several hundred years
to get