In 1960, when To Kill a Mockingbird was published, much of white America viewed the coming together of the races as immoral, dangerous, even ungodly. A white woman would never admit to doing what the Mockingbird character Mayella Ewell does, breaking a “time-honored code” by kissing Tom Robinson, a black man. And after being caught, she seeks to save herself from the scorn of society by accusing Robinson of her. Such an accusation was a death sentence for an African American man. “ was the central drama of the white psyche,” says Diane McWhorter, author of the Pulitzer prize–winning Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution. “A black man raping a white woman justified the most draconian social control over black people.” The vigilante punishment for such a sin was lynching, as would have been the case with the mob of white men smelling of “whiskey and pigpen” who herd up to Maycomb’s jail to cart away Robinson. While they are stopped, in Mockingbird, because Scout Finch shames them, many real-life incidents went unchecked. Between 1882 and 1951, 3,437 blacks in the United States died that way, 299 of them in Alabama. Harper Lee’s father, Amasa Coleman Lee, was a lot like Scout’s father Atticus Finch, and she clearly sketched him and local events when creating the plot of Mockingbird. As with Atticus, A.C. Lee was a lawyer, and, like Scout, the young Harper recalled earlier, “I did sit in the courtroom watching my father argue cases and talk to juries.”
