Summer of ’60

To Kill a Mockingbird was published on July 11, 1960. It was the summer the birth-control pill was released, Elvis Presley returned to civilian life and recorded “It’s Now or Never,” some seven hundred U.S. military advisers were in South Vietnam, Psycho was in movie theaters, "Gunsmoke" was on TV, the Kennedy-Nixon campaign was just beginning, Wilma Rudolph won three gold medals at the summer Olympics in Rome, and Alan Drury’s Advise and Consent, a novel about a secretary-of-state nominee who once had ties to the Communist Party, was at the top of the bestselling fiction list. Better Homes and Gardens First Aid for Your Family was moving quickly to the top of the nonfiction list.

That summer, most forms of racial segregation were not yet against the law, and civil disobedience, such as sit-ins at lunch counters, had only just begun. “People forget how divided this country was,” Scott Turow said. [They forget] “what the animosity was to the Civil Rights Act, which probably never would have been passed if John F. Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated, and it became his legacy. But that was 1963. In 1960 there were no laws guaranteeing that African Americans could enter any restaurant, any hotel. We didn’t have those laws. In that world, [for Harper Lee] to speak out this way was remarkable.” In Alabama only sixty-six thousand of the state’s nearly one million blacks were registered to vote. Three years later, in his 1963 inauguration speech, Governor George Wallace vowed “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.” Six months after his inauguration, Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door refusing to integrate the University of Alabama.

In Birmingham, where the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that killed four young girls would become a turning point in the civil rights movement, Andrew Young was working on the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s campaign to desegregate the downtown businesses. “You had, for the first time, black people making union wages in the steel mills,” he remembered. “And they began to build nice homes. These were veterans of service in the military who came back, went to school, got good jobs, and started building nice little homes, nothing fancy, just little three-bedroom frame houses. There were more than sixty of those houses dynamited [by whites in the late fifties]. To Kill a Mockingbird gave us the background to that, but it also gave us hope that justice could prevail. I think that’s one of the things that makes it a great story, because it can be repeated in many different ways.”

Novelist Mark Childress, who wrote Crazy in Alabama, recalled the story of how Abraham Lincoln greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in 1862. President Lincoln reportedly said “So this is the little lady who started our big war.” Childress said, “I think the same can be said of Harper Lee. This was one of the most influential novels, not necessarily in a literary sense, but in a social sense. It gives white Southerners a way to understand the racism that they’ve been brought up with and to find another way. And for white Southerners at that time, there was no other way. And most white people in the South were good people. Most white people in the South were not throwing bombs and causing havoc. But they had been raised in the system, and I think the book really helped them come to understand what was wrong with the system in the way that any number of treatises could never do, because it was popular art, because it was told from a child’s point of view.”

Rick Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter and memoirist, saw the novel’s impact on whites, on “young men who grew up on the wrong side of the issue that dominates this book. They start reading it, and the next thing you know, it’s not just held their interest, it’s changed their views. That’s almost impossible. But it happens.”

One of the reasons it can happen, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Diane McWhorter suggested, is that “even though To Kill a Mockingbird is such a classic indictment of racism, it’s not really an indictment of the racist, because there’s this recognition that those attitudes were ”normal” then. For someone to rebel and stand up against them was exceptional, and Atticus doesn’t take that much pride in doing so, just as he would have preferred not to have to be the one to shoot the mad dog. He simply does what he must do and doesn’t make a big deal about it.”

--adapted from Mary Murphy’s book Scout, Atticus, and Boo

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