Atticus Finch which they became lawyers. Freedman argued that Atticus Finch is dishonest, unethical, sexist, and inherently racist, and that he did nothing to challenge the racist status quo in Maycomb. Freedman's article sparked furious controversy, with one legal scholar opining, "What Monroe really wants is for Atticus to be working on the front lines for the NAACP in the 1930s, and, if he's not, he's disqualified from being any kind of hero; Monroe has this vision of lawyer as prophet. Atticus has a vision of lawyer not only as prophet but as parish priest". In 1997 the Alabama State Bar erected
Atticus Finch a monument dedicated to Atticus in Monroeville marking his existence as the "first commemorative milestone in the state's judicial history". Atticus Finch's willingness to support social outcasts and victims of prejudice is the eponymous inspiration for the name of the Atticus Circle, which is an organization composed of "straight allies" (that is, heterosexual people supportive of the LGBT-rights movement). In 2016, the lawyer Joseph Madison Beck published the memoir "My Father & Atticus Finch", in which he noted the numerous parallels between his father Foster Beck's defense of a black man accused of raping a white woman in the 1938