Editorial Content for My Father and Atticus Finch: A Lawyer's Fight for Justice in 1930s Alabama
Contributors
Reviewer (text)
TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD has been and remains one of the most revered novels of the 20th century. 2015 saw the release of a new Harper Lee book, GO SET A WATCHMAN, that was published to much hype, anticipation, disappointment and debate. It also marked the passing of the legendary author, whose life after the publication of MOCKINGBIRD was unique in many aspects. Avoiding the public literary limelight, she spent the majority of her life in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, with her sister, Alice. In recent years, several unauthorized biographies of her life were released, and a semi-authorized one, THE MOCKINGBIRD NEXT DOOR by Marja Mills, was published to some controversy when Lee disavowed it.
"Atticus Finch lives in the minds of many as an inspiration. Foster Beck reminds us that the inspiration comes not from one fictional man, but from courageous men fighting for justice across our nation."
MOCKINGBIRD, in part, centered on the trial of Tom Robinson, a black man charged with rape. Atticus Finch, the attorney father portrayed in the book, is called upon to represent Robinson. Despite clear evidence of his innocence, Robinson is convicted and shortly thereafter dies while attempting to escape from authorities. Attorney Joseph Madison Beck’s MY FATHER AND ATTICUS FINCH is a memoir about his own father, Foster Campbell Beck, who in the 1930s defended a black man accused of rape in a small Alabama community. Beck went so far as to write Lee because his research found a number of similarities between the case tried by his father and the fictional case presented in the pages of MOCKINGBIRD. Lee wrote Beck and acknowledged the “obvious parallels,” but told him she could not recall her father’s case and that her book was “fiction.”
The history of the South in 1930s Alabama clearly tells us that there were few, if any, African-American attorneys practicing law. That same history tells us that many African-Americans charged with the rape of white women were defendants in criminal cases across the state. Therefore, it would not be difficult to find instances where white attorneys were called upon to represent black defendants in court. Rape was a crime punishable by death, and since the trial of the Scottsboro Boys in an Alabama courtroom in the 1920s, the appointment of counsel to those charged with capital crimes was required by the U.S. Constitution. Those numbers make it clear that there were countless white Alabama attorneys who served as court-appointed counsel in rape cases. Many of their descendants would welcome the opportunity to claim to be the model for Atticus Finch, one of America’s most revered fictional characters.
It makes little difference whether or not there is a connection between Foster Beck and Atticus Finch. MY FATHER AND ATTICUS FINCH can stand on its own as an important reminder of just how far America’s legal system has progressed in the last 75 years. Joseph Beck has combined his family’s handwritten history, interviews, newspaper articles and trial transcripts to paint a vivid portrait of his father’s role in representing Charles White. While Finch’s representation of Robinson lacked sufficient details of an actual criminal case, Beck provides a lot of those specifics in his book. The prison visits, appellate briefs, community backlash and immense personal toll that comes from death penalty litigation are all part of this memoir.
Atticus Finch lives in the minds of many as an inspiration. Foster Beck reminds us that the inspiration comes not from one fictional man, but from courageous men fighting for justice across our nation.
Teaser
As a child, Joseph Beck heard about his father’s legacy: Foster Beck had once been a respected trial lawyer who defied the unspoken code of 1930s Alabama by defending a black man charged with raping a white woman. Now a lawyer himself, Beck has become intrigued by the similarities between his father’s story and the one at the heart of Harper Lee’s iconic novel. This riveting memoir seeks to understand how race, class and the memory of the South’s defeat in the Civil War produced the trial’s outcome, and how these issues figure into our literary imagination.
Promo
As a child, Joseph Beck heard about his father’s legacy: Foster Beck had once been a respected trial lawyer who defied the unspoken code of 1930s Alabama by defending a black man charged with raping a white woman. Now a lawyer himself, Beck has become intrigued by the similarities between his father’s story and the one at the heart of Harper Lee’s iconic novel. This riveting memoir seeks to understand how race, class and the memory of the South’s defeat in the Civil War produced the trial’s outcome, and how these issues figure into our literary imagination.
About the Book
The story of Foster Beck, the author’s late father, whose defense of a black man accused of rape in 1930s Alabama foreshadowed the trial at the heart of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD.
As a child, Joseph Beck heard the stories --- when other lawyers came up with excuses, his father courageously defended a black man charged with raping a white woman.
Now a lawyer himself, Beck reconstructs his father's role in State of Alabama vs. Charles White, Alias, a trial that was much publicized when Harper Lee was twelve years old.
On the day of Foster Beck’s client’s arrest, the leading local newspaper reported, under a page-one headline, that "a wandering negro fortune teller giving the name Charles White" had "volunteered a detailed confession of the attack" of a local white girl. However, Foster Beck concluded that the confession was coerced. The same article claimed that "the negro accomplished his dastardly purpose," but as in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, there was evidence at the trial to the contrary. Throughout the proceedings, the defendant had to be escorted from the courthouse to a distant prison “for safekeeping,” and the courthouse itself was surrounded by a detachment of sixteen Alabama highway patrolmen.
The saga captivated the community with its dramatic testimonies and emotional outcome. It would take an immense toll on those involved, including Foster Beck, who worried that his reputation had cast a shadow over his lively, intelligent and supportive fiancé, Bertha, who had her own social battles to fight.
This riveting memoir, steeped in time and place, seeks to understand how race relations, class and the memory of southern defeat in the Civil War produced such a haunting distortion of justice, and how it may figure into our literary imagination.
