"To Kill A Mockingbird" marks anniversary...

As this year is the 50th anniversary of the publication of "To Kill A Mockingbird" by Harper Lee, I wanted to present a book review that I wrote for the Sept. 26, 1997 issue of the Mirror, the student newspaper at the University of Northern Colorado, when I served as general manager there. I had written it for "Banned Book Week" and the student editor had generously allowed for its publication. For my review at the time, I noted that it was available at UNC's Michener Library, the college bookstore, and many locations. It is available now at bookstores and libraries everywhere.

The 1962 film version, starring the great Gregory Peck, is also excellent. (It was a good year for movies with serious themes. Other films that same year included "The Miracle Worker" about Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan, "Days of Wine and Roses" about alcoholism, "Lawrence of Arabia," "Long Day's Journey Into Night," "Bird Man of Alcatraz," "Lolita" and "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?")

I could also mention a lighter moment in education one time when I asked students to tell me what book Harper Lee had written. One student responded, "To Kill A Salesman." Probably its sequel was "Death of a Mockingbird," as I realized that the student had mixed up the titles of Lee's "Mockingbird" and Arthur Miller's play "Death of a Salesman." Needless to say, education is an ongoing process. !!!! Anyway, here is my book review...

When Atticus Finch gives his children an air rifle, he tells them that they should never kill a mockingbird. Providing beautiful music to the world, mockingbirds do no harm to anyone, he says.

Harper Lee's 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "To Kill A Mockingbird" is a story about two children and the powerful lessons they learn from their father and from the racial inequities within a small Alabama town in the 1930s. Told from the narrative viewpoint of a 6-year-old girl, the story follows a lawyer's attempt to seek justice for a black man who is falsely accused of raping a white woman. The lawyer is the narrator's widowed father. He represents justice in a town where the Southern culture has preserved its corrupting traditions of racial and class prejudice.

The book emphasizes that children are born with an instinct for justice, but learn prejudice through socialization. Respect for the individual is also addressed in the relationship between the children and the father. Throughout the story, the father's messages to his children are a constant and deliberate attempt to lift them above the community's racism. "You never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them," he says to his children. He tells them to judge people by their character and not the color of their skin, which is one of the strongest messages of the Civil Rights Movement.

Another lesson in this book is about real courage. Among many instances, the novel includes a scene of the lawyer, Atticus, facing an angry, gun-carrying mob as he sits unarmed in front of the jail where his client is being held.

Author Harper Lee, a descendant of General Robert E. Lee, undoubtedly rankled white Southern readers at a time that coincided with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In more recent times, the books has drawn anger from black readers who are particularly offended by the use of racial epithets by many of the characters. Since 1980, the book has been challenged in a New York school district as a "filthy, trash novel," in Indiana schools because it "represents institutionalized racism under the guise of good literature," and also in Arizona, California, Illinois, Mississippi, and Missouri schools because of racial slurs and profanity. The book was removed from a Louisiana school library shelf because of its "objectionable content," and was banned from a Texas school's English reading list because of "conflicts with the values of the community."

Racial epithets and a few off-color words are in the novel. However, people or groups who are offended by that kind of literary license should not read the book. If they don't want their children to read the book, that is also their choice in the role of parental guidance. Yet, book-banning is another matter. It is an infringement upon the rights of every reader within the school or community. Practically speaking, book-banning doesn't work. Many of the books at the UNC Bookstore's "Banned Books Week" display are best-sellers that have reached classic status.

"To Kill A Mockingbird" is one of the leading fiction books of all time. More than 15 million copies of the book have been sold. Those who punish "Mockingbird" for its harsh wording are missing the greater lessons of how prejudice undermines justice.

After years of being edited, "To Kill A Mockingbird" progressed from a short story to a novel. Lee's fictional and somewhat biographical novel has won widespread acclaim as well as a Pulitzer Prize. Lee, like the characters of "Mockingbird," was born and grew up in an Alabama community and her father was a lawyer there. According to the Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature, Harper Lee, born in 1926, was six months away from earning a law degree at the University of Alabama when she went to New York in 1949 to pursue a literary career.

Lee's "Mockingbird," as any mockingbird, provides beauty and song within the world that sometimes isn't so beautiful. It would be terrible to kill a mockingbird. It also would be terrible to ban a book that provides many excellent cultural insights.