The War

"Only the soldier really lives the war." (Eric Sevareid)

It is hard to imagine the scope of a war that took 50 to 60 million lives including 400,000 Americans. It touched every corner of the globe.  During the 1940's, everyone was affected by the Second World War.

Ken Burns studies the effects that "the greatest cataclysm in human history" had on residents of these four cities: Mobile, Alabama.  Sacramento, California. Waterbury, Connecticut.  Luverne, Minnesota.  The series is an attempt to explain "the things men do in war and the things war does to men" (https://www.pbs.org/thewar/about_letter_from_producers.htm)

Resident expert Geoffrey Ward wrote the script for Ken Burns series The War and provides much of the commentary.  The War series is divided into seven episodes:

Episode One:  A Necessary War

Episode Two:  When Things Get Tough

Episode Three:  A Deadly Calling

Episode Four:  Pride of Our Nation

Episode Five:  FUBAR

Episode Six:  The Ghost Front

Episode Seven:  A World Without War 

http://www.theaterbyte.com/bluray-uhd-reviews/the-war-blu-ray-review.html

To Kill a Mockingbird

Mockingbird courtesy upload.wikmedia.org. 

Harper Lee chose the mockingbird for the title of her 1960 book because she thought it represented innocence.  However, the incident that moved her to write the book was anything but innocent.  It was the murder of a black boy named Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955 which sparked the Civil Rights Movement.

Harper Lee was born on April 28, 1926 in the small sleepy town of Monroeville, Alabama.  Like Scout in her famous novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Miss Lee was the daughter of a lawyer.  Like Boo Radley, the recluse in her book, she had a neighbour who lived in a boarded up house.  One of her good friends was Truman Capote, the inspiration for the character of Dill in her story.  Miss Lee attended the University of Alabama in the 1940's where she wrote articles about racial injustice.  

Harper Lee in Monroeville courthouse courtesy britannica.com.

In the 1950's, Harper Lee moved to New York City where she started writing a novel called Atticus, the name of the lawyer character who defends a black man who has been charged with the murder of a white woman.  By 1957, Miss Lee completed the novel.  Three years later, she secured a publisher, at which time she changed the book's title to To Kill a Mockingbird.  At one point she was so frustrated with her manuscript that she actually tossed in out her New York window into the snow, but her editor, Mr. Lippincott, convinced her to retrieve it.  While Mr. Lippincott was interested in the story, he warned her that it would probably only sell several thousand copies.  

The book was well received by the public.  People speculated about Harper Lee's motivation for writing the story.  Some said that she was motivated by the 1931 case in Scottsboro, Alabama of nine black men accused of raping two white women.  Five of the nine defendants were sentenced to long prison terms despite the fact that many people thought their accusers had lied.  However, Harper Lee would have only been six years old at the time of the Scottsboro case.  

Emmett Till photographed on Christmas Day 1954 courtesy upload.wikimedia.org. 

It turned out that it was the Emmett Till case that inspired Miss Lee to write her story, a much more recent case.  Emmett, a black youth, had been born and raised in Chicago.  A relative invited him to spend the summer in Mississippi and he agreed.  While his mother warned him that Southern rules were quite different than Northern ones, he said he would be able to manage on his own.  However, after entering a general store and supposedly flirting with a white woman, he was hunted down by the white woman's husband and brutally murdered.  Emmett's mother was so outraged by her son's killing that she insisted that his corpse be photographed and printed in newspapers for the entire nation to see what "Southern justice" looked like.  

Harper Lee's novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. By 1962 it was made into a play as well as a movie, the latter starring Gregory Peck as Atticus.  Miss Lee chose to take a back seat in the movie production.  By 1964 she no longer did interviews with the press.  She withdrew from the public eye, eventually moving back to her hometown.  To Kill a Mockingbird would become a staple in high school English classes.  The novel has sold 15 million copies and has never been out of print.  It was the only book Harper Lee ever had published.

Gregory Peck starred in the 1962 movie courtesy wordpress.co

Charles Morgan Jr.'s Speech That Shocked Birmingham

"A mad, remorseful community asks:  'Who did it?  Who threw that bomb?  Was it a Negro or a white?'  The answer should be:  We all did." (Charles Morgan Jr.)

On September 15, 1963, in the heat of the Civil Rights Movement, a bomb went off at a Birmingham church, killing four young girls attending Sunday School.  The city was in shock.  Who would perform such a heinous crime?  It had only been a couple of weeks since Martin Luther King Jr.'s successful March on Washington.  It seemed like the closer blacks came to achieving their rights, the more racist whites attacked them.  

The day following the bombing, as the police searched the rubble of the church, a young white lawyer named Charles Morgan Jr. stood up before a group of businessmen at the Young Men's Business Club and expressed his outrage at the crime which had taken place.

"Four little girls were killed in Birmingham yesterday.  A mad, remorseful, worried community asks:  'Who did it?  Who threw that bomb?  Was it a Negro or a white?'  The answer should be:  We all did it."

Charles Morgan Jr. was tired of people "getting away with murder".  He was tired of seeing the South, which he deeply loved, be taken over by hatemongers.  He was tired of the "silent acquiescence of good people who saw wrong but didn't try to right it."  

"The 'who' is every individual who talks about the 'niggers' and spreads the seeds of his hate to his neighbour and his son...The who is every governor who ever shouted for lawlessness and became a law violator.  It is every Senator and representative who in the halls of Congress stands and with mock humility tells everybody that things back home aren't really like they are.  It is courts that move every so slowly and newspapers that timorously defend the law."

Charles Morgan Jr. attended the University of Alabama where he studied law.  He was at the centre of the storm living in Alabama in the 1950's and 1960's.  He was active in state politics.

"Yesterday, when Birmingham , which prides itself of the number of churches, was attending worship services, a bomb went off and an all white police force moved into action, a police force which has been praised by city officials at least once a day for a month or so.  A police force which has solved no bombings.  A police force which many Negroes feel is perpetuating the very evils we decry."

Charles Morgan Jr. suffered for his remarks.  The phone calls started immediately, threatening his wife and son.  One caller described every place his family had been in the space of a day.  The threats became so real that Charles was forced to flee the state.  Here are his final remarks:

"Those four little Negro girls were human beings.  They had lived their fourteen years in a leaderless city:  a city where no one accepts responsibility, where everybody wants to blame someone else."

Note:  For more information about the Birmingham Church Bombing, visit http://alinefromlinda.blogspot.ca/2012/05/ballad-of-birmingham.html.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/09/the-speech-that-shocked-birmingham-the-day-after-the-church-bombing/279565/

Rosa Parks Writes About Her Arrest

"I had been pushed around all my life and felt at this moment I couldn't take it anymore." 

(Rosa Parks)

Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus to a white person in 1955, helped spark the Civil Rights Movement.  While her name was forever etched on the history books, Parks paid a high price for her stance.  

Writing on a piece of Montgomery Department Store stationery, Parks explained:  

"I had been pushed around all my life and felt at this moment I couldn't take it anymore." When I asked the policeman why we had to be pushed around, he said he didn't know.  'The law is the law.  You are under arrest.'  I didn't resist." (http://www.vox.com/2015/2/4/7977373/rosa-parks-collection-documents)

The following year saw the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a successful tool to integrate public transportation in the city.  Parks lodged a protest against her arrest.  She was very much in the public eye.  Near the end of 1956, the seamstress was let go from her job at the Montgomery Department Store.  Her husband, who had been forbidden to discuss her case at work, was also let go from his position.  Old Jim Crow wasn't going to give up without a fight.

As Parks explained in her letter:

"little children are so conditioned early to learn their place in this segregated pattern as they take their first toddling steps and are weaned from their mother's breast."

In early 1957, Parks jumped through another hoop and secured her right to vote, at a time when few blacks had that right in the Deep South.  But the economic situation looked bleak in Alabama and Rosa and her husband Raymond moved to Detroit, Michigan by the early 1960's.  Rosa found work as a receptionist for a U. S. Congressman.  

For more information, read http://alinefromlinda.blogspot.ca/2011/12/on-rosas-ride.html.

Mockingbird's Dill Harris Based on Truman Capote

"Mr. and Mrs. Lee, Harper Lee's mother and father, lived very near.  Harper Lee was my best friend...I'm a character in her book, which takes place in the same small town in Alabama where we lived.  Her father was a lawyer and she and I used to go to trials all the time.  We went to trials instead of going to the movies." (Truman Capote)

When I first read To Kill a Mockingbird to my Grade 10 class in Windsor, the image of Scout and Dill timidly approaching the recluse Bo Radley's house stuck in my head.  The image of Scout and Dill peeking their heads over the courthouse balcony as they watched Scout's dad defend a black man accused of rape lingered in my memory.  

In the 1920's and early 1930's, Harper Lee and Truman Capote were next door neighbours.  They developped a close relationship, spending long afternoons together.  Lee used to sneak into her lawyer father's study and sat at his typewriter as Capote dictated wildly imaginative stories.  Lee and Capote used to attend Mr. Lee's trials, the way other kids would go to the movies.   

Another pastime the friends shared was "the killing of mockingbirds", mentioned in a letter to a friend in 1955, seven years before the publication of the famous book.  The two were what Anne of Green Gables would call "kindred spirits".  Capote moved to New York; Lee later followed.  Both became writers.  Both became recluses later in life.  While Capote was a prolific writer, Lee only published one book in her lifetime (Go Set a Watchman came out posthumously).  Capote is immortalized in Lee's classic novel, a testament to a lasting friendship.

For more information, visit http://www.rjellory.com/an-interesting-slant-on-the-truman-capoteharper-lee-relationship-by-norman-mailer/.

     

Amasa Coleman Lee Inspiration for Mockingbird's Atticus Finch

"Atticus Finch was further enshrined in the cultural canon through Gregory Peck's portrayal in the Oscar winning 1962 film.  Parents named their children after him.  Law professors assigned the book in ethics class.  The Alabama Law Association erected a monument to him in Monroeville, Ms. Lee's hometown." (http://www.wsj.com/articles/harper-lees-father-the-inspiration-for-atticus-finch-changed-his-segregation-views-1436670661)

http://www.wsj.com/articles/harper-lees-father-the-inspiration-for-atticus-finch-changed-his-segregation-views-1436670661

The image of Gregory Peck's character, Atticus Finch, outside an Alabama jail, confronting an angry mob that wants to lynch the black man whom he represents, is forever etched on the memory of those who saw the movie To Kill a Mockingbird.  The scene is not that far off the mark.  In 1934, Mockingbird author Harper Lee's father, whom she based Atticus on, confronted KKK members in the street, exchanging words with the leader.

Amasa Coleman Lee, born in Alabama in 1880, attended law school and set up a practice in Monroeville.  He married Frances Finch who gave birth to Nelle Harper Lee.  Mr. Lee adored his daughter and tended to indulge her.  

Harper admired her father and the stand that he took on social issues.  IN 1919, Mr. Lee defended two black men charged with a botched robbery and murder.  Even so, the two men were convicted and hanged.  He continued to defend blacks in the 1920's and 1930's, preaching:  "Equal rights for all, special privileges for none."

However, in 1954, with the victory for civil rights in Brown vs Board of Education, Mr. Lee resisted school integration.  He was, nonetheless, part of the Deep South establishment.  Harper was disappointed that her father was agreeing with the status quo.  Her childhood view of him as this larger than life character who fought for the underdog was shattered.

However, by the late 1950's, when Harper was working on her manuscript for To Kill a Mockingbird, her father had a change of heart.  He talked about voting rights for blacks.  The book was published in 1960, selling 2.5 million copies in the first year and remaining on the bestseller list for almost two years.  

In 1962, the movie debuted in theatres.  "Atticus Finch was further enshrined in the cultural canon through Gregory Peck's portrayal in the Oscar winning 1962 film.  Parents named their children after him.  Law professors assigned the book in ethics class.  The Alabama Law Association erected a monument to him in Monroeville, Ms. Lee's hometown." 

The same year, the man who inspired the character passed away.  His daughter outlived him by decades.  Her other book, Go Set a Watchman, which shed some light on her father's initial resistance to integration, was published last month.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/11/harper-lee-my-little-sister-alice-finch-lee