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The origin of the term: Jim Crow.

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Jim Crow/Jump Jim Crow | The Black Past: Remembered and Reclaimed

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An Online Reference Guide to African American History

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Harper Lee, American writer nationally acclaimed for her novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). She also wrote Go Set a Watchman (2015), which was essentially a sequel To Kill a Mockingbird, though it was written before that book. Learn more about Lee’s life and books.

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To spend an hour in Monroeville, Alabama, is to know why Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, ranks as one of the crankiest writers on the planet. Strongly inclined to put aside the hype and hoopla and let literature speak for itself, Lee, the best-known native of the town (pop. 6,372) that served as the model for her novel's Maycomb, has found herself living a short drive from one restaurant called the Mockingbird Grill and another named Radley's Fountain, after Boo Radley, the character in Mockingbird who might be voted Least Likely to Become a Restaurateur. That would be a mere T-shirt's toss from a gift shop peddling Mockingbird hats, tote bags, necklaces, Christmas ornaments, refrigerator magnets, wrist bands (inscribed "I see it, Scout, I see it!") and paper fans. The gift shop is in the venerable courthouse where as a child Lee watched her father practice law, and which she later rendered so vividly in her book. The courthouse has long since been turned into a Mockingbird museum, to the delight of a constant stream of camera-toting tourists, foreign and domestic. I sympathize with Lee, who has steadfastly refused to take part in the merchandising of her most famous accomplishment. Life can't be easy when everything you hate about success stands between you and the Piggly Wiggly.

This could be an especially maddening season for the 84-year-old author, given that 2010 marks the 50th year since To Kill a Mockingbird was published, and we all know how the media love anniversaries. Witness this very article, for example, though believe me no novelists were annoyed during its production. After what I had heard about her, I was too scared to knock on the door of her residence of record, a neat brick, reportedly book-lined house she shared with her older sister Alice, or even to request an interview through the closest thing there are to proper channels. I should also disclose at this juncture that I am working under the influence of Inspirational Writer's Water, purchased at the gift shop described above.

Lee relied on perspiration as much as inspiration during the drawn-out creation of the book that, when it finally appeared on July 11, 1960, changed her life instantly and forever. Trans-lated into more than 40 languages, Mockingbird has sold over 30 million copies; with help from the anniversary hullabaloo, HarperCollins (the book was originally published by the now-defunct Lippincott) will probably sell at least a million more this year, mostly to high schools and junior high schools, where it has been a staple of reading lists since it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961. The 1962 movie version, starring Gregory Peck, won three Oscars, yet somehow that earnest black-and-white film never trumped the three-dimensional chiaroscuro Mockingbird that shimmers in peoples' imaginations after they experience Lee's work on the printed page. Indeed, many say the story of Scout Finch; her lawyer father, Atticus; her brother, Jem; their neighbor Dill; and the ill-fated Tom Robinson is their all-time favorite novel. In surveys asking what one book every civilized person should read, Mockingbird routinely finishes second to the Bible, and in one (if I may go a bit Maycomb on you here) it up and finished first.

Readers have been living with the book for so long that they may not realize how profoundly odd this is. Mockingbird is hardly a marketer's or publicist's dream, and could easily have been dismissed as a downer. Set in the "tired old town" of Maycomb, in the unglamorous era of the Great Depression, it tells the story of a widower attorney who tries in vain to defend a black laborer from a wrongful charge of rape. It's pretty clear at the outset that Tom Robinson's word won't be taken over that of the unstable white incest victim who accuses him. And...guess what? It isn't. That maddening miscarriage of justice is not even the worst thing that happens to Robinson in the book. Like life itself, Mockingbird has no neat, symmetrical story arc, allowing obstacles to be introduced and then overcome before the ending. (That may be one reason the movie's producer, Alan J. Pakula, said there was no studio stampede to acquire film rights.) The other thing Mockingbird lacks is what salespeople might call synergistic potential: it has no series mates, or even a sequel, that can help turn a book into a brand. There is no To Kill a Cockatiel or Valley of the Dills or Am I Boo? Mockingbird is Harper Lee's one and only published book.

Lee has never discussed her output, or lack of one, publicly. Not since the mid-'60s has she said anything for the record about her career. "My book had a universal theme," she told the Birmingham Post-Herald in 1962. "It's not a 'racial' novel. It portrays an aspect of civilization, not necessarily Southern civilization."

But don't call her a recluse. Miss Nelle, as she's known around town (she went with her middle name on the dust jacket because she didn't want Yankees to elide Nelle Lee into "Nellie"), is that tallish woman with closely cropped white hair who over the years you could see in the aisles of the grocery store or having coffee at Hardees, often in the company of Alice, who also never married. (Lee is rumored to have had a slight stroke in 2008.) They were living comfortably but not extravagantly a short walk from the site of the modest wood-frame house where she, and the book's narrator, Scout, were raised. (In its place now is an ice-cream stand known, surprisingly, as Mel's Dairy Dream, and not To Chill a Mockingbird.) She would play golf and, occasionally, fish. ("I'm not like Thomas Wolfe," Lee said in a 1961 Life magazine interview. "I can go home again.") During the summer, when she would migrate to New York City, she would go to museums and the theater and root for the Mets, the natural choice for someone with an underdog thing as big as the Ritz. In 2007, Lee went to the White House to accept the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor, from President George W. Bush (and said nothing that was reported). She has a quick and easy smile for those who respect her privacy. But reporters who request an interview through 98-year-old Alice, a sneaker-wearing attorney at the family firm and her sister's semiofficial gatekeeper, can expect a polite but ironclad refusal. ("Hell no," Lee herself once wrote in reply to a scribe's request.)

It was not always thus. At first, perhaps buoyed by the mostly rave reviews and strong sales, Lee talked to almost anyone with a pad or microphone, saying that Atticus only superficially resembled her beloved father, A.C. ("one of the few men I've known who has genuine humility") and the trial in her novel "was a composite of all the trials in the world" (as opposed to, say, a gloss on the Scottsboro Boys' trial, as has been widely supposed). The questions, though, tended to be repetitive, annoyingly so. Journalists seemed obsessed with determining the degree to which the novel was autobiographical. Lee tended to say that her characters were basically fictional, but her biography does seem more ambiguous. After all, she had been a tomboy like Scout, with an older brother like Jem. A Boo Radleyish character lived just down her street. Dill, meanwhile, closely resembled the young Truman Capote, who as a boy had spent summers at his cousin's house, next door to Lee's.

Once interviewers broached the subject of Capote, Lee might have braced herself for a question that would have been not just annoying but insulting: Wasn't it true that her pal Truman had written much of her book? Capote-always competitive, and, of course, a bit of a crackpot-didn't discourage the rumor, answering vaguely when asked about his contributions to her novel. The truth (as is evident from Capote's private correspondence) is that he did not write a word of Mockingbird, and that Lee, who assisted him as a reporter and researcher on In Cold Blood, contributed substantially more to Capote's 1966 blockbuster than he ever admitted. Still, the rumor persists-to the point where it is addressed (and debunked) in one of the Monroeville museum's exhibits.

Another distasteful question was the inevitable two-parter about what she was doing next and when the world would see it. Soon after Mockingbird appeared, Lee said, only half-jokingly, "All I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama," and she began work on a second Southern novel, but its progress was slow. This in itself was not surprising: Mockingbird had not exactly fallen fully formed from Lee's brain. She had turned out essays, humor pieces and short stories for campus publications during her one year at Huntingdon College in Montgomery and her years at the University of Alabama (where she studied law), but writing did not come easily to her. After she moved to New York City in 1949, she struggled for years with a hodgepodge of anecdotes about small-town Southern life, first called Go Set a Watchman and then Atticus. She received encouragement from an agent, Maurice Crain, and an editor, Lippincott's Tay Hohoff, who had seen the work-in-progress, but one night in 1957 she flung the unfinished manuscript out the window of her Manhattan cold-water flat. After a teary phone call to Hohoff, Lee charged down the stairs, recovered the forsaken pages-and then began a title-on-down revision that resulted in a book that would become a Literary Guild selection and Book of the Month Club alternate, and that the New Yorker would call "unpretentious and totally ingenious" and the Chicago Tribune would hail as "a novel of strong contemporary national significance."

Many years later, to a fan who engaged her in conversation in a fast-food restaurant in Monroeville, Lee would say straightforwardly that the success of Mockingbird "overwhelmed" her, making it impossible for her to write a follow-up book. She wrestled with that second novel for several years-and then one day Alice rather too calmly told a BBC interviewer that the manuscript had been stolen from their home and the project had been abandoned. (And Alice later told a Chicago Tribune reporter that the book never got beyond the conceptual stage.) In the mid-1980s Lee began researching a nonfiction book about an Alabama preacher suspected of being a serial killer, tentatively titled The Reverend. But she abandoned it, too, perhaps feeling that just as she could not out-Lee Lee she could not out-Capote Capote.

From this low point, however, Lee seems to have found her way to a place of relative peace. She did squawk a few years ago when the museum crossed a line in her mind and started selling a collection of recipes called Calpurnia's Cookbook, after the black housekeeper in the novel. (The book was withdrawn.) But it seems that Lee has come to accept that she will publish only one book, and to enjoy that she exceeded her expectations in doing so. "When you're at the top," she once told her cousin Dickie Williams, "there is only one way to go."

Lee will in all likelihood stand aside and let Mockingbird's 50th anniversary happen. Truth be told, Monroeville is a charming place, where the palpable pride in its native daughter's achievement tends to make up for the occasional crassness. Besides, Monroe--villians have been exploiting Lee's work for decades: when the movie came out in '62, Charles J. Shields reports in his biography Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee (2006), the local theater offered $10 to the first five people who showed up with live mockingbirds. Jane Ellen Clark, director of the Old Courthouse Museum, notes that pilgrims started flocking spontaneously to Monroeville in 1960, as soon as the book was published. "All these people who said it was their favorite book would save up for the trip and find the town," she says. For thousands each year, "this was their vacation, and we created the museum because we wanted to give them something to see." Every spring since 1991, the town has staged a several-times-a-week theatrical production of To Kill a Mockingbird with local volunteer actors in the roles. Act I takes place on the town square, weather permitting, and Act II inside the courthouse. If the air conditioning isn't working, it can get steamy in that cavernous chamber, especially up in the "colored balcony" (as it was called in the '30s), where I saw last year's production. But if you've got a bottle of water, inspirational or otherwise, it makes for a uniquely American evening, right down to the realization that, as you're standing and applauding for the sometimes contradictory notions of small-town values and racial tolerance, Harper Lee would prefer to be a thousand miles to the north, cheering, "Let's Go, Mets!"

Charles Leerhsen wrote Crazy Good: The True Story of Dan Patch, the Most Famous Horse in America.

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With To Kill a Mockingbird, published 50 years ago, Lee gave America a story for the ages. Just don't ask her about it

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Peering back across Harper Lee's life, it can seem impossible to distinguish the novelist from her masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee died at the age of 89 in her hometown of Monroeville, Ala., on Friday morning - yet it's clear that her legacy will live on much longer than that, through her characters and the readers who have embraced them for decades.

"America and the world knew Harper Lee as one of the last century's most beloved authors," Hank Conner, Lee's nephew, announced in a statement. "We knew her as Nelle Harper Lee, a loving member of our family, a devoted friend to the many good people who touched her life, and a generous soul in our community and our state."

Conner's experience, though - and the experiences of those who knew Lee personally - are exceptional. For the most part, Lee's readers have known the author only through To Kill a Mockingbird, her debut - and, for decades, her only - novel.

The book depicts the strivings of a small-town Alabama lawyer, Atticus Finch, on behalf of Tom Robinson, a black man charged with raping a white woman, and it casts the events through the lens of Finch's precocious daughter, Scout. Despite its relative brevity, the book bears considerable weight, both in the gravity of its themes and the care with which it treats them.

Perhaps, then, it should be no surprise that Lee and her editor, Tay Hohoff, weren't exactly expecting this book to fly off store shelves.

Hohoff "cautioned her that a book with racism at its center involving a rape trial was not a thing in 1960 to make people run to the bookstores for," says Charles J. Shields, author of Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee. "She counseled her client and said, 'If we sell 2,500 copies and break even, you should be proud.' "

You already know this twist: Turns out they were flat wrong.

The book all but immediately became a best-seller. (And it's gone on to sell more than 40 million copies, according to The Washington Post.) It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. Just a year later, it was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film.

What accounts for that kind of success? In many ways, it struck a chord for the very reasons Lee's editor was feeling cautious, says Mary Murphy, director of the documentary Hey, Boo: Harper Lee & To Kill a Mockingbird.

"You know, there were two big revolutions in the '60s in this country when To Kill a Mockingbird came out: One was civil rights and the other was women's rights. And in a way, To Kill a Mockingbird speaks to both those things," Murphy says.

"Scout Finch at 6 enjoyed, as child growing up in the Depression, enjoyed more freedoms than most women in the '60s did. She wore pants, she swore, she played with boys, she spoke her mind," Murphy continues. "And of course the Civil Rights movement: Many people I spoke to who were active in the movement said that the fact that a white Southerner wrote that book gave them hope that justice could prevail."

And then, seemingly all at once, Lee was gone - at least, that's how the popular narrative goes. The author quietly continued to write, but she decided to step out of the spotlight. Lee did not publish another novel for more than five decades, and she refused nearly every attempt by the press to speak with her.

Naturally, there grew around her the mythology of the reclusive writer. It's a myth that Murphy says simply isn't true.

"Harper Lee was not a recluse. She was not holed up in her house like Boo Radley - unless of course, you were a reporter, and then she was not going to talk to you," Murphy says. "I think that's a big distinction."

Wayne Flynt, her friend and professor emeritus at Auburn University, says her absence had little to do with preconceived notions of her personality.

"Many people describe her as an introvert, many people explain her as being extremely shy, she was neither an introvert nor shy," Flynt says. "She was a private woman, she lived very much within herself, she was quite content within herself."

And he explains Lee's decision not to publish again - for decades - quite simply.

"I suppose what I would say is that there are some writers who have one great story to tell and they tell that one great story."

In the meantime, that singular novel was becoming a staple on high school syllabi, a beloved text read and reread even as its era passed on into the next, and new generations picked up the book.

"The people who have To Kill a Mockingbird seared in memory - their first reading experience of To Kill a Mockingbird seared in their brain - it's the biggest book club in the world," Murphy says. "I mean, for all our conversations about Facebook and social media, To Kill a Mockingbird is the biggest social media group of our time, in a way."

Lee was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom for her work in 2007, and a National Medal of Arts in 2010.

Then, the second twist: Last year, after some 55 years of waiting, Lee decided it was time to publish a second novel, Go Set a Watchman. The book was initially billed by many as a sequel to Mockingbird, for it shared principal characters, reviving Atticus and Scout in a setting several years later than Mockingbird's main action.

Yet, in many ways, it was less a sequel than a glimpse at what would have been, had Lee gone with her first impulses as a writer rather than following her editor's advice and reworking her first drafts. For years, Hohoff had worked with Lee on radical revisions to the text, from 1957 to the book's eventual publication in 1960, according to The New York Times.

"I was a first-time writer, so I did as I was told," Lee said in a 2015 statement.

Go Set a Watchman, then, let Lee's early visions of her definitive work find the light of day. In the process, though, it also invited significant skepticism that Lee, who had suffered a stroke in 2007, was fully in control of the decision.

Then, there were the decidedly mixed reviews.

"All I know for certain is that Go Set a Watchman is kind of a mess that will forever change the way we read a masterpiece," NPR's Maureen Corrigan, for one, wrote about the book when it was released in July 2015. Her assessment was by no means uncommon.

Lee's own reaction to the reviews and the controversy?

"She chortled," Flynt told AL.com at the time.

And herein, perhaps, rests a lesson: Despite our best attempts to confine Lee's life to the pages she wrote and the characters she created, her own life far exceeded the bounds of her book covers. Lee was more than Atticus, Scout and Tom; she was more than the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. And, perhaps, she often remembered that fact much better than the rest of us.

"She was a good companion," Flynt remembers. "She had lots of people she adored.

"One thing I will say about Harper Lee: If you ever met Harper Lee, you got just exactly what you saw. She never tried to be anything her entire life except who she was."

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The Measure Of Harper Lee: A Life Shaped By A Towering Text

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Peering back across Harper Lee's life, it can seem impossible to distinguish the novelist from her masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird. Lee died at the age of 89 in her hometown of Monroeville, Ala., on Friday morning - yet it's clear that her legacy will live on much longer than that, through her characters and the readers who have embraced them for decades.

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Nelle Harper Lee (1926-2016) is the author of one of the most affecting and widely read books of American literature. In creating To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Lee drew deeply and essentially from her coming-of-age years in the small town of Monroeville, Monroe County, Alabama. Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel explores the dimensions of prejudice, hate, loyalty, and love through the eyes of a young girl as she awakens to the complexities of human nature and its capacity for both good and evil. In July 2015, Lee published Go Set a Watchman, the original incarnation of To Kill a Mockingbird that was discovered in a safety-deposit box in Monroeville. It met with widespread public interest and media focus.

Lee was born in Monroeville on April 28, 1926, the youngest child of Amasa Coleman Lee, a lawyer, and Frances Finch, who apparently struggled with episodes of mental illness (perhaps what is now diagnosed as manic depression). Lee denied that the story of To Kill a Mockingbird is autobiographical, but her fiction was certainly influenced and shaped by her childhood experiences, shared with a brother and two sisters and fellow author-to-be Truman Capote, a frequent summer visitor to Monroeville. As she described this period of her life in a 1965 interview, "We had to use our own devices in our play, for our entertainment. We didn't have much money. . . . We didn't have toys, nothing was done for us, so the result was that we lived in our imagination most of the time. We devised things; we were readers and we would transfer everything we had seen on the printed page to the backyard in the form of high drama."

Lee attended the public grammar school and high school in Monroeville. She developed an interest in writing during her childhood and continued to write when she attended Huntingdon College in Montgomery, from 1944 through 1945. In 1945, she transferred to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa to study law but left in 1949 without completing her degree. While at UA, Lee wrote columns, feature stories, and satires for the university newspaper and literary publications. In 1949, she left Alabama to pursue a literary career in New York.

Lee worked in a briefly in a bookstore in New York but then became an airline reservations clerk so that her work during the day differed from the mental energy required by her commitment to writing at night. After some time and with a financial contribution from friends, a gift she remembers in "Christmas to Me," she was able to quit her job and write full time. Over a period of several years, interrupted by the deaths of her mother and her brother and other responsibilities, she worked on her novel. After completing the manuscript in 1959, Lee went to Kansas with Truman Capote to provide research assistance while he worked on the manuscript for his nonfiction novel In Cold Blood. He dedicated the book to her, along with his then partner Jack Dunphy, and credited her with "secretarial work" and with befriending some of the individuals with whom he sought interviews. Her only comment on the expedition has been that "the crime intrigued Truman, and I'm intrigued with crime, and boy, I wanted to go. It was deep calling to deep." Reports, both oral and written, persisted that Harper Lee was working for years on a project similar to Capote's In Cold Blood, but no such manuscript has ever been found. Reportedly titled The Reverend, the work was said to have been about a series of unsolved murders in a small town in central Alabama.

To Kill a Mockingbird (friends say that she called it "The Bird") was published in 1960 and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961. Published during the civil-rights era, which focused the eyes of the world on her home state, Lee's novel is set in the 1930s, the decade during which Alabama's infamous "Scottsboro Trials" took place. In the novel, Lee relates events through her narrator, Jean Louise "Scout" Finch. She and her brother Jem are reared by Atticus, their widowed father, and Calpurnia, the African American domestic servant whom Atticus trusts with their care while he works in his law office. Atticus's sister, Alexandria, occasionally interferes, especially after Scout starts school. In the summers, Dill (a character loosely based on Capote) visits his aunt and helps Scout and Jem invent schemes to lure an eccentric neighbor, Arthur "Boo" Radley, from his home. The children also become embroiled in the tension and conflict that result from Atticus's defense of Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping Mayella Ewell, a white woman. To the children's dismay, despite convincing evidence and moving arguments, Atticus fails to secure an acquittal for Tom from the all-white, all-male jury. Later, Tom is shot in prison. Mayella's father, Bob, seeks revenge on Atticus for embarrassing his family by attacking Scout and Jem, an attack thwarted by Boo Radley that brings together the plots, and thus the themes, of the novel.

The success of To Kill a Mockingbird was so immediate that the novel's release was described as a "summer storm." Critics praised Lee for capturing the setting of a small southern town with its complex social fabric of blacks and whites of all classes, from aristocratic to hard-working middle class to "white trash." Other reviewers commented on its narrative technique, characterization, balance of humor and tragedy, use of symbolism, and careful interweaving of numerous themes, such as childhood innocence and adult perceptions, justice and injustice, racial tolerance and intolerance, and cowardice and courage, whether the physical courage of facing a lynch mob and shooting a rabid dog or the courage of standing up for one's beliefs in the face of public condemnation.

Lee won numerous awards for To Kill a Mockingbird in addition to the Pulitzer Prize: the Brotherhood Award of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (1961), the Alabama Library Association Award (1961), Bestsellers Paperback of the Year Award (1962), and additional designations such as a Literary Guild selection, a Reader's Digest condensed book selection, and an alternate for the Book of the Month Club.

The film version of To Kill a Mockingbird, released in 1962, underscored the success of the novel with its own success. Adapted by screenwriter Horton Foote and directed by Robert Mulligan, the film stars Gregory Peck as Atticus and two Alabamians-Mary Badham and Phillip Alford-as Scout and Jem. Both Peck and Foote took home Academy Awards for their work, as did art director Henry Bumstead.

Both the novel and film versions of To Kill a Mockingbird continue to hold the public's interest. An increasing number of scholars write about the novel, analyzing its moral, sociological, psychological, literary, legal, and racial and gender issues and themes. Students in schools and colleges worldwide study the novel. Large cities adopt it as the book to be read by all citizens. To Kill a Mockingbird has now sold nearly 50 million copies and been translated into more than 40 languages. As she said she desired, Harper Lee left a "record" of the "rich social pattern" of small-town American life.

Harper Lee published several short pieces in the early 1960s, including essays in McCall's and Vogue and a lively analysis of the literary qualities of A. J. Pickett's History of Alabama, which she originally presented at the Eufaula History and Heritage Festival in 1983 and published in 1985. But afterward, decades passed without any further literary output from Lee. In interviews after the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee claimed she was working on another novel, but over time she said that the one novel had taken enough of her life and the lives of her family. A second novel would have to be published posthumously. In July 2006, Lee finally responded to a repeated request from media magnate Oprah Winfrey to write for O, The Oprah Magazine, writing her a letter about how she learned to read, a selection that echoes Scout's learning to read in her father's lap. In 2007 Lee suffered a stroke and moved from New York to an assisted living residence in her hometown of Monroeville.

On February 3, 2015, HarperCollins issued a surprising press release announcing the publication of a second novel, Go Set a Watchman. As the media continued to cover the unexpected news, readers learned that the forthcoming novel was not a "second" novel but rather an early draft of To Kill a Mockingbird. In the 1950s, after her agent, Maurice Crain, and her editor at Lippincott, Tay Hohoff, had read it and made recommendations, Lee rewrote it to focus on the children, seen in flashbacks in the novel. The rewriting resulted in the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird. In July 2015, Go Set a Watchman was published unrevised, as originally submitted. The plots of the two novels are related in that Watchman is set in 1956 and tells the story of the grown Jean Louise returning to her home town of Maycomb, Alabama, for her summer visit from New York City, where she lives and works.

The news sparked a whirlwind of controversies. Media figures and others questioned whether Lee wanted the book published and if she had the mental capacity to give permission. Anonymous sources even reported to the Alabama Adult Protective Services Division that she was the victim of elder abuse and financial fraud. The state found no evidence of either, and members of the family and close friends reported that she was supportive of, and excited about, the decision to publish the earlier novel.

Go Set a Watchman was released on July 13, 2015 and was an immediate bestseller, selling 720,000 copies in the first 36 hours of sales. The reviews were mixed, however, with many people failing to note that it was an unrevised early draft of the successful To Kill a Mockingbird. A more complex, and somewhat negative, depiction of Atticus Finch further fueled controversy among critics, scholars, and readers.

On February 10, 2016, a press release announced that Aaron Sorkin is writing a new adaption of To Kill a Mockingbird. Scott Rudin will produce the play, and Bartlett Sher will direct. It is scheduled for the Broadway 2017-2018 season.

Lee was widely recognized throughout her life for her contributions to literature, culture, and the humanities. In 2002, Lee received the Alabama Humanities Award from the Alabama Humanities Foundation. In May 2007, Harper Lee was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which is considered the nation's highest formal recognition of artistic merit; she also was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007 for her contribution to literature. In March 2011, President Barack Obama awarded Lee?along with other artists such as Meryl Streep, James Taylor, and Quincy Jones?the 2010 National Medal of Arts for her "outstanding contribution to the excellence, growth, support and availability of the arts."

Harper Lee died on February 19, 2016, in her hometown of Monroeville and was buried in Hillcrest Cemetery.

"Dewey Had Important Part in Solving Brutal Murders." The Grapevine Magazine (1960)

To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)

"Christmas to Me." McCall's (1961)

"Love-In Other Words," Vogue (1961)

"When Children Discover America," McCall's (1965)

"Truman Capote" Book-of-the-Month Club News (1966)

"Romance and High Adventure," Clearings in the Thicket: An Alabama Humanities Reader (1985)

Bloom, Harold, ed. Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Contemporary Literary Views Series. New York: Chelsea House, 1996.

Godfree, Elizabeth C., ed. "Special Issue: Symposium on To Kill a Mockingbird." Alabama Law Review 45 (Winter 1994): 389-727.

Johnson, Claudia Durst. To Kill a Mockingbird: Threatening Boundaries. Twayne's Masterwork Studies Series, no. 139. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994.

---. Understanding To Kill a Mockingbird: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historic Documents. "Literature in Context" Series. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Madden, Kerry. Harper Lee: A Twentieth-Century Life. New York: Viking, 2009.

Meyer, Michael J., ed. Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird: New Essays. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2010.

Noble, Donald, ed. Critical Insights: To Kill a Mockingbird. Ipswich, N.J.: Salem Press, 2009.

Petry, Alice Hall, ed. On Harper Lee: Essays and Reflections. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007.

Shields, Charles J. Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee. New York: Henry Holt, 2006; revised ed., 2016.

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Nelle Harper LeeNelle Harper Lee (1926-2016) is the author of one of the most affecting and widely read books of American literature. In creating To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Lee drew deeply and essentially from her coming-of-age years in the small town of Monroeville, Monroe County, Alabama.

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The Legendary Friendship of Harper Lee and Truman Capote

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The two writers had been friends since childhood

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Harper Lee used the words "Methodist" and "John Wesley" in the first pages of her classic novel "To Kill a Mockingbird," and Methodism figured in her life as well as her fiction.

Lee's death on Feb. 19, at 89, in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, brought expressions of sadness from fellow United Methodists.

There was also deep gratitude for her work, particularly "To Kill a Mockingbird," a Depression-era tale of race relations in the Deep South, published in 1960.

"It's not only a great piece of art, but it really is a grappling with America's greatest problem," said retired United Methodist Bishop Will Willimon, who led the North Alabama Conference.

The Rev. Matt Rawle, a United Methodist pastor and author of the book "The Faith of a Mockingbird," posted this on his blog: "Harper Lee will be missed, but her story will continue to focus an incarnational light shining toward justice."

Dawn Wiggins Hare, top executive of the United Methodist Commission on the Status and Role of Women, knew Lee as a fellow resident of Monroeville and fellow member of First United Methodist Church in that town.

"Imagine the strength of character, the undaunted courage, the ethical heart that a young 30-something woman from south Alabama would have to have to write a book about racial injustice before the Civil Rights Act had even passed," said Hare, a former Alabama judge. "It took clarity of vision to see injustice in what was otherwise accepted as the norm."

Deep Methodist roots

Born Nelle Harper Lee, the author grew up Methodist and was a longtime member of First United Methodist Church in Monroeville. Hare called the Lee family the "backbone" of the church and noted that the stained-glass windows in its chapel were given in honor of Lee's parents.

Lee's older sister, Alice, who died in 2014 at age 103, was a lawyer and a leading layperson in the local church as well as the first woman to lead the Alabama-West Florida Conference delegation at General Conference.

Harper Lee attended United Methodist-related Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1944, later transferring to the University of Alabama.

"Her words resonate with evidence of personal and social holiness that reflect her Methodist heritage, which she held dear," the Rev. J. Cameron West, Huntingdon's president, said in a statement Friday.

Lee attended law school, but chose writing as her career, working as an airline ticket agent in New York while making her first efforts at fiction in her spare time. Friends surprised her with a monetary gift that allowed her to focus fulltime on her writing, and "To Kill a Mockingbird" was the ultimate result.

The novel references Methodism on the first page as it sketches the family background of the fictional Finch family at the center of the story. The second page mentions John Wesley, Methodism's founder.

Mostly, the story is a coming-of-age tale in which a young daughter, Scout, observes her father, Atticus Finch, bravely challenge local racial mores by representing a black man falsely accused of rape.

Prodding a nation

After "To Kill a Mockingbird" came out in 1960, winning the Pulitzer Prize and becoming a popular film with Gregory Peck as Atticus, Lee published almost nothing for decades. Meanwhile, "To Kill a Mockingbird" would gradually become one of the all-time best-selling novels, not least because of its status as a staple of secondary school required reading lists.

Last year, her novel "Go Set a Watchman" came out amid controversy over whether it represented a finished work or a less-accomplished draft of "To Kill a Mockingbird," belatedly published for commercial reasons.

This novel, whose title comes from a verse in Isaiah, also includes Methodist references. Atticus Finch is less noble in the second book, which is set in the 1950s as the civil rights movement grew and the U.S. Supreme Court ordered an end to segregated schools.

Willimon is a champion of both novels.

"White male Southern Methodist that I am, I think reading both of those books together is like having my life narrated back to me," he said.

Former President George W. Bush, a United Methodist, awarded Lee the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007. He released a statement saying he and wife Laura were mourning Lee's death.

"Harper Lee was ahead of her time, and her masterpiece 'To Kill a Mockingbird' prodded America to catch up with her," Bush said.

Hare stressed that Methodism helped shape Lee, and Lee honored Methodism with her life and work.

Lee, she said, "is a shining example of the capacity of a lay person to see injustice, speak up, tell the story, and transform the world. We as United Methodists define our mission as making disciples for Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. Those were not just words to Nelle Harper Lee. That was her legacy."
Hodges, a United Methodist News Service writer, lives in Dallas. Contact him at (615) 742-5470 or newsdesk@umcom.org

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Harper Lee was United Methodist in word, deed - The United Methodist Church

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Harper Lee used the words "Methodist" and "John Wesley" in the first pages of her classic novel "To Kill a Mockingbird," and Methodism figured in her life as well as her fiction. Lee's death on Feb. 19, at 89, in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, brought expressions of sadness from fellow United Methodists.

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Remembering the life and legacy of Harper Lee

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Renowned author Harper Lee, whose debut novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” has become enshrined within the American literary canon, died early Friday morning at age 89. Jeffrey Brown sits down with bestselling novelist Allan Gurganus to discuss Lee’s works and enduring legacy.

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Includes information about Truman Capote, another author from Monroeville and friend of Harper Lee for years. Additionally, there are maps and photos of the town that inspired Maycomb.

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The twiggy branches of the redbuds were in bloom, the shell-like magnolia petals had begun to twist open, the numerous flowering Bradford pear trees-more blossomy than cherries-were a froth of white, and yet this Sunday morning in March was unseasonably chilly in Monroeville, Alabama. A week before, I had arrived there on a country road. In the Deep South, and Alabama especially, all the back roads seem to lead into the bittersweet of the distant past.

Over on Golf Drive, once a white part of town, Nannie Ruth Williams had risen at 6 in the dim light of a late winter dawn to prepare lunch-to simmer the turnip greens, cook the yams and sweet potatoes, mix the mac and cheese, bake a dozen biscuits, braise the chicken parts and set them with vegetables in the slow cooker. Lunch was seven hours off, but Nannie Ruth's rule was "No cooking after church." The food had to be ready when she got home from the Sunday service with her husband, Homer Beecher Williams-"H.B." to his friends-and anyone else they invited. I hadn't met her, nor did she yet know that one of the diners that day would be me.

The sixth of 16 children, born on the W. J. Anderson plantation long ago, the daughter of sharecropper Charlie Madison (cotton, peanuts, sugar cane, hogs), Nannie Ruth had a big-family work ethic. She had heard that I was meeting H.B. that morning, but had no idea who I was, or why I was in Monroeville, yet in the Southern way, she was prepared to be welcoming to a stranger, with plenty of food, hosting a meal that was a form of peacemaking and fellowship.

Monroeville styles itself "the Literary Capital of Alabama." Though the town had once been segregated, with the usual suspicions and misunderstandings that arise from such forced separation, I found it to be a place of sunny streets and friendly people, and also-helpful to a visiting writer-a repository of long memories. The town boasts that it has produced two celebrated writers, who grew up as neighbors and friends, Truman Capote and Harper Lee. Their homes no longer stand, but other landmarks persist, those of Maycomb, the fictional setting of To Kill A Mockingbird. Still one of the novels most frequently taught in American high schools, Lee's creation has sold more than 40 million copies and been translated into 40 languages.

Among the pamphlets and souvenirs sold at the grandly domed Old Courthouse Museum is Monroeville, The Search for Harper Lee's Maycomb, an illustrated booklet that includes local history as well as images of the topography and architecture of the town that correspond to certain details in the novel. Harper Lee's work, published when she was 34, is a mélange of personal reminiscence, fictional flourishes and verifiable events. The book contains two contrasting plots, one a children's story, the tomboy Scout, her older brother Jem and their friend Dill, disturbed in their larks and pranks by an obscure house-bound neighbor, Boo Radley; and in the more portentous story line, Scout's father's combative involvement in the defense of Tom Robinson, the decent black man, who has been accused of rape.

What I remembered of my long-ago reading of the novel was the gusto of the children and their outdoor world, and the indoor narrative, the courtroom drama of a trumped-up charge of rape, a hideous miscarriage of justice and a racial murder. Rereading the novel recently, I realized I had forgotten how odd the book is, the wobbly construction, the arch language and shifting point of view, how atonal and forced it is at times, a youthful directness and clarity in some of the writing mingled with adult perceptions and arcane language. For example, Scout is in a classroom with a new teacher from North Alabama. "The class murmured apprehensively," Scout tells us, "should she prove to harbor her share of the peculiarities indigenous to that region." This is a tangled way for a 6-year-old to perceive a stranger, and this verbosity pervades the book.

I am now inclined to Flannery O'Connor's view of it as "a child's book," but she meant it dismissively, while I tend to think that its appeal to youngsters (like that of Treasure Island and Tom Sawyer) may be its strength. A young reader easily identifies with the boisterous Scout and sees Atticus as the embodiment of paternal virtue. In spite of the lapses in narration, the book's basic simplicity and moral certainties are perhaps the reason it has endured for more than 50 years as the tale of an injustice in a small Southern town. That it appeared, like a revelation, at the very moment the civil rights movement was becoming news for a nation wishing to understand, was also part of its success.

Monroeville had known a similar event, the 1934 trial of a black man, Walter Lett, accused of raping a white woman. The case was shaky, the woman unreliable, no hard evidence; yet Walter Lett was convicted and sentenced to death. Before he was electrocuted, calls for clemency proved successful; but by then Lett had been languishing on Death Row too long, within earshot of the screams of doomed men down the hall, and he was driven mad. He died in an Alabama hospital in 1937, when Harper Lee was old enough to be aware of it. Atticus Finch, an idealized version of A.C. Lee, Harper's attorney father, defends the wrongly accused Tom Robinson, who is a tidier version of Walter Lett.

Never mind the contradictions and inconsistencies: Novels can hallow a place, cast a glow upon it and inspire bookish pilgrims-and there are always visitors, who'd read the book or seen the movie. Following the free guidebook Walk Monroeville, they stroll in the downtown historic district, admiring the Old Courthouse, the Old Jail, searching for Maycomb, the locations associated with the novel's mythology, though they search in vain for locations of the movie, which was made in Hollywood. It is a testament to the spell cast by the novel, and perhaps to the popular film, that the monument at the center of town is not to a Monroeville citizen of great heart and noble achievement, nor a local hero or an iconic Confederate soldier, but to a fictional character, Atticus Finch.

These days the talk in town is of Harper Lee, known locally by her first name, Nelle (her grandmother's name Ellen spelled backward). Avoiding publicity from the earliest years of her success, she is back in the news because of the discovery and disinterment of a novel she'd put aside almost six decades ago, an early version of the Atticus Finch-Tom Robinson story, told by Scout grown older and looking down the years. Suggesting the crisis of a vulnerable and convicted man in the Old Jail on North Mount Pleasant Avenue, the novel is titled Go Set a Watchman.

"It's an old book!" Harper Lee told a mutual friend of ours who'd seen her while I was in Monroeville. "But if someone wants to read it, fine!"

Speculation is that the resurrected novel will be sought after as the basis of a new film. The 1962 adaptation of To Kill A Mockingbird, with Gregory Peck's Oscar-winning performance as Atticus Finch, sent many readers to the novel. The American Film Institute has ranked Atticus as the greatest movie hero of all time (Indiana Jones is number two). Robert Duvall, who at age 30 played the mysterious neighbor, Boo Radley, in the film, recently said: "I am looking forward to reading the [new] book. The film was a pivotal point in my career and we all have been waiting for the second book."

According to biographer Charles Shields, author of Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, Nelle started several books after her success in 1960: a new novel, and a nonfiction account of a serial murderer. But she'd abandoned them, and apart from a sprinkling of scribbles, seemingly abandoned writing anything else-no stories, no substantial articles, no memoir of her years of serious collaboration with Truman Capote on In Cold Blood. Out of the limelight, she had lived well, mainly in New York City, with regular visits home, liberated by the financial windfall but burdened-maddened, some people said-by the pressure to produce another book. (Lee, who never married, returned to Alabama permanently in 2007 after suffering a stroke. Her sister Alice, an attorney in Monroeville who long handled Lee's legal affairs, died this past November at age 103.)

It seems-especially to a graphomaniac like myself-that Harper Lee was perhaps an accidental novelist-one book and done. Instead of a career of creation, a refinement of this profession of letters, an author's satisfying dialogue with the world, she shut up shop in a retreat from the writing life, like a lottery winner in seclusion. Now 89, living in a care home at the edge of town, she is in delicate health, with macular degeneration and such a degree of deafness that she can communicate only by reading questions written in large print on note cards.

"What have you been doing?" my friend wrote on a card and held it up.

"What sort of fool question is that?" Nelle shouted from her chair. "I just sit here. I don't do anything!"

She may be reclusive but she is anything but a shrinking violet, and she has plenty of friends. Using a magnifier device, she is a reader, mainly of history, but also of crime novels. Like many people who vanish, wishing for privacy-J.D. Salinger is the best example-she has been stalked, intruded upon, pestered and sought after. I vowed not to disturb her.

**********

Nannie Ruth Williams knew the famous book, and she was well aware of Monroeville's other celebrated author. Her grandfather had sharecropped on the Faulk family land, and it so happened that Lillie Mae Faulk had married Archulus Julius Persons in 1923 and given birth to Truman Streckfus Persons a little over a year later. After Lillie Mae married a man named Capote, her son changed his name to Truman Capote. Capote had been known in town for his big-city airs. "A smart ass," a man who'd grown up with him told me. "No one liked him." Truman was bullied for being small and peevish, and his defender was Nelle Lee, his next-door neighbor. "Nelle protected him," that man said. "When kids would hop on Capote, Nelle would get 'em off. She popped out a lot of boys' teeth."

Capote, as a child, lives on as the character Dill in the novel. His portrayal is a sort of homage to his oddness and intelligence, as well as their youthful friendship. "Dill was a curiosity. He wore blue linen shorts that buttoned to his shirt, his hair was snow-white and stuck to his head like duck-fluff; he was a year my senior but I towered over him." And it is Dill who animates the subplot, which is the mystery of Boo Radley.

Every year, a highly praised and lively dramatization of the novel is put on by the town's Mockingbird Players, with dramatic courtroom action in the Old Courthouse. But Nannie Ruth smiled when she was asked whether she'd ever seen it. "You won't find more than four or five black people in the audience," a local man told me later. "They've lived it. They've been there. They don't want to be taken there again. They want to deal with the real thing that's going on now."

H.B. Williams sighed when any mention of the book came up. He was born in a tenant farming family on the Blanchard Slaughter plantation where "Blanchie," a wealthy but childless white landowner, would baby-sit for the infant H.B. while his parents worked in the fields, picking and chopping cotton. This would have been at about the time of the Walter Lett trial, and the fictional crime of Mockingbird -mid-'30s, when the Great Depression gripped "the tired old town" of the novel, and the Ku Klux Klan was active, and the red clay of the main streets had yet to be paved over.

After the book was published and became a best seller, H.B., then a school principal, was offered the job of assistant principal, and when he refused, pointing out that it was a demotion, he was fired. He spent years fighting for his reinstatement. His grievance was not a sequence of dramatic events like the novel, it was just the unfairness of the Southern grind. The pettifogging dragged on for ten years, but H.B. was eventually triumphant. Yet it was an injustice that no one wanted to hear about, unsensational, unrecorded, not at all cinematic.

In its way, H.B.'s exhausting search for justice resembles that of the public-interest attorney Bryan Stevenson in his quest to exonerate Walter McMillian, another citizen of Monroeville. This was also a local story, but a recent one. One Saturday morning in 1986, Ronda Morrison, a white 18-year-old clerk at Jackson Cleaners, was found shot to death at the back of the store. This was in the center of town, near the Old Courthouse made famous 26 years earlier in the novel about racial injustice. In this real case, a black man, Walter McMillian, who owned a local land-clearing business, was arrested, though he'd been able to prove he was nowhere near Jackson Cleaners that day. The trial, moved to mostly white Baldwin County, lasted a day and a half. McMillian was found guilty and sentenced to death.

It emerged that McMillian had been set up; the men who testified against him had been pressured by the police, and later recanted. Bryan Stevenson-the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, who today is renowned for successfully arguing before the Supreme Court in 2012 that lifetime sentences for juveniles convicted of homicide constituted cruel and unusual punishment-had taken an interest in the case. He appealed the conviction, as he relates in his prize-winning account, (2014). After McMillian had been on death row for five years, his conviction was overturned; he was released in 1993. The wheels of justice grind slowly, with paper shuffling and appeals. Little drama, much persistence. In the town with a memorial to Atticus Finch, not Bryan Stevenson.

And that's the odd thing about a great deal of a certain sort of Deep South fiction-its grotesquerie and gothic, its high color and fantastication, the emphasis on freakishness. Look no further than Faulkner or Erskine Caldwell, but there's plenty in Harper Lee too, in Mockingbird, the Boo Radley factor, the Misses Tutti and Frutti, and the racist Mrs. Dubose, who is a morphine addict: "Her face was the color of a dirty pillowcase and the corners of her mouth glistened with wet which inched like a glacier down the deep grooves enclosing her chin." This sort of prose acts as a kind of indirection, dramatizing weirdness as a way of distracting the reader from day to day indignities.

Backward-looking, few Southern writers concern themselves with the new realities, the decayed downtown, the Piggly Wiggly and the pawn shops, the elephantine Walmart, reachable from the bypass road, where the fast-food joints have put most of the local eateries out of business (though AJ's Family Restaurant, and the Court House Café in Monroeville remain lively). Monroeville people I met were proud of having overcome hard times. Men of a certain age recalled World War II: Charles Salter, who was 90, served in the 78th Infantry, fighting in Germany, and just as his division reached the west bank of the Rhine he was hit by shrapnel in the leg and foot. Seventy years later he still needed regular operations. "The Depression was hard," he said. "It lasted here till long after the war." H.B. Williams was drafted to fight in Korea. "And when I returned to town, having fought for my country, I found I couldn't vote."

Some reminiscences were of a lost world, like those of the local columnist, George Thomas Jones, who was 92 and remembered when all the roads of the town were red clay, and how as a drugstore soda jerk he was sassed by Truman Capote, who said, "I sure would like to have something good, but you ain't got it....A Broadway Flip." Young George faced him down, saying, "Boy, I'll flip you off that stool!" Charles Johnson, a popular barber in town, worked his scissors on my head and told me, "I'm from the child abuse era-hah! If I was bad my daddy would tell me to go out and cut a switch from a bridal wreath bush and he'd whip my legs with it. Or a keen switch, more narrah. It done me good!"

Mr. Johnson told me about the settlement near the areas known as Franklin and Wainwright, called Scratch Ankle, famous for inbreeding. The poor blacks lived in Clausell and on Marengo Street, the rich whites in Canterbury, and the squatters up at Limestone were to be avoided. But I visited Limestone just the same; the place was thick with idlers and drunks and barefoot children, and a big toothless man named LaVert stuck his finger in my face and said, "You best go away, mister-this is a bad neighborhood." There is a haunted substratum of darkness in Southern life, and though it pulses through many interactions, it takes a long while to perceive it, and even longer to understand.

The other ignored aspect of life: the Deep South still goes to church, and dresses up to do so. There are good-sized churches in Monroeville, most of them full on Sundays, and they are sources of inspiration, goodwill, guidance, friendship, comfort, outreach and snacks. Nannie Ruth and H.B. were Mount Nebo Baptists, but today they'd be attending the Hopewell C.M.E. Church because the usual pianist had to be elsewhere, and Nannie Ruth would play the piano. The pastor, the Rev. Eddie Marzett, had indicated what hymns to plan for. It was "Women's Day." The theme of the service was "Women of God in these Changing Times," with appropriate Bible readings and two women preachers, the Rev. Marzett taking a back pew in his stylish white suit and tinted glasses.

**********

Monroeville is like many towns of its size in Alabama-indeed the Deep South: a town square of decaying elegance, most of the downtown shops and businesses closed or faltering, the main industries shut down. I was to discover that To Kill A Mockingbird is a minor aspect of Monroeville, a place of hospitable and hard-working people, but a dying town, with a population of 6,300 (and declining), undercut by NAFTA, overlooked by Washington, dumped by manufacturers like Vanity Fair Mills (employing at its peak 2,500 people, many of them women) and Georgia Pacific, which shut down its plywood plant when demand for lumber declined. The usual Deep South challenges in education and housing apply here, and almost a third of Monroe County (29 percent) lives in poverty.

"I was a traveling bra and panty salesman," Sam Williams told me. "You don't see many of those nowadays." He had worked for Vanity Fair for 28 years, and was now a potter, hand-firing cups and saucers of his own design. But he had lucked out in another way: Oil had been found near his land-one of Alabama's surprises-and his family gets a regular small check, divided five ways among the siblings, from oil wells on the property. His parting shot to me was an earnest plea: "This is a wonderful town. Talk nice about Monroeville."

Willie Hill had worked for Vanity Fair for 34 years and was now unemployed. "They shut down here, looking for cheap labor in Mexico." He laughed at the notion that the economy would improve because of the Mockingbird pilgrims. "No money in that, no sir. We need industry, we need real jobs."

"I've lived here all my life-81 years," a man pumping gas next to me said out of the blue, "and I've never known it so bad. If the paper mill closes, we'll be in real trouble." (Georgia-Pacific still operates three mills in or near Monroeville.) Willie Hill's nephew Derek was laid off in 2008 after eight years fabricating Georgia-Pacific plywood. He made regular visits to Monroeville's picturesque and well-stocked library (once the LaSalle Hotel: Gregory Peck had slept there in 1962 when he visited to get a feel for the town), looking for jobs on the library's computers and updating his résumé. He was helped by the able librarian, Bunny Hines Nobles, whose family had once owned the land where the hotel stands.

**********

Selma is an easy two-hour drive up a country road from Monroeville. I had longed to see it because I wanted to put a face to the name of the town that had become a battle cry. It was a surprise to me-not a pleasant one, more of a shock, and a sadness. The Edmund Pettus Bridge I recognized from newspaper photos and the footage of Bloody Sunday-protesters being beaten, mounted policemen trampling marchers. That was the headline and the history. What I was not prepared for was the sorry condition of Selma, the shut-down businesses and empty once-elegant apartment houses near the bridge, the whole town visibly on the wane, and apart from its mall, in desperate shape, seemingly out of work. This decrepitude was not a headline.

Just a week before, on the 50th anniversary of the march, President Obama, the first lady, a number of celebrities, civil rights leaders, unsung heroes of Selma and crowders of the limelight had observed the anniversary. They invoked the events of Bloody Sunday, the rigors of the march to Montgomery, and the victory, the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

But all that was mostly commemorative fanfare, political theater and sentimental rage. The reality, which was also an insult, was that these days in this city which had been on the front line of the voting rights movement, voting turnout among the 18-to-25 age group was discouragingly low, with the figures even more dismal in local elections. I learned this at the Interpretive Center outside town, where the docents who told me this shook their heads at the sorry fact. After all the bloodshed and sacrifice, voter turnout was lagging, and Selma itself was enduring an economy in crisis. This went unremarked by the president and the civil rights stalwarts and the celebrities, most of whom took the next plane out of this sad and supine town.

Driving out of Selma on narrow Highway 41, which was lined by tall trees and deep woods, I got a taste of the visitable past. You don't need to be a literary pilgrim; this illuminating experience of country roads is reason enough to drive through the Deep South, especially here, where the red clay lanes-brightened and brick-hued from the morning rain-branch from the highway into the pines; crossing Mush Creek and Cedar Creek, the tiny flyspeck settlements of wooden shotgun shacks and old house trailers and the white-planked churches; past the roadside clusters of foot-high ant hills, the gray witch-hair lichens trailing from the bony limbs of dead trees, a mostly straight-ahead road of flat fields and boggy pinewoods and flowering shrubs, and just ahead a pair of crows hopping over a lump of crimson road-kill hash.

I passed through Camden, a ruinous town of empty shops and obvious poverty, just a flicker of beauty in some of the derelict houses, an abandoned filling station, the white-washed clapboards and a tiny cupola of old Antioch Baptist Church (Martin Luther King Jr. had spoken here in April 1965, inspiring a protest march that day and the next), the imposing Camden public library, its facade of fat white columns; and then the villages of Beatrice-Bee-ah-triss-and Tunnel Springs. After all this time-warp decay, Monroeville looked smart and promising, with its many churches and picturesque courthouse and fine old houses. Its certain distinction and self-awareness and its pride were the result of its isolation. Nearly 100 miles from any city, Monroeville had always been in the middle of nowhere-no one arrived by accident. As Southerners said, You had to be going there to get there.

Hopewell C.M.E. Church-in a festive Women's Day mood-was adjacent to the traditionally black part of town, Clausell. The church's sanctuary had served as a secret meeting place in the 1950s for the local civil rights movement, many of the meetings presided over by the pastor, R.V. McIntosh, and a firebrand named Ezra Cunningham, who had taken part in the Selma march. All this information came from H.B. Williams, who had brought me to a Hopewell pew.

After the hymns (Nannie Ruth Williams on the piano, a young man on drums), the announcements, the two offerings, the readings from Proverbs 31 ("Who can find a virtuous woman, for her price is far above rubies"), and prayers, Minister Mary Johnson gripped the lectern and shouted: "Women of God in these Changing Times, is our theme today, praise the Lord," and the congregation called out "Tell it, sister!" and "Praise his name!"

Minister Mary was funny and teasing in her sermon, and her message was simple: Be hopeful in hard times. "Don't look in the mirror and think, 'Lord Jesus, what they gonna think 'bout my wig?' Say 'I'm coming as I am!' Don't matter 'bout your dress-magnify the Lord!" She raised her arms and in her final peroration said, "Hopelessness is a bad place to be. The Lord gonna fee-all you with hope. You might not have money-never mind. You need the Holy Spirit!"

Afterward, the hospitable gesture, my invitation to lunch at the Williams house, a comfortable bungalow on Golf Drive, near the gates to Whitey Lee Park, which was off-limits to blacks until the 1980s, and the once-segregated golf course. We were joined at the table by Arthur Penn, an insurance man and vice president of the local NAACP branch, and his son Arthur Penn Jr.

I raised the subject of Mockingbird, which made Nannie Ruth shrug. Arthur Senior said, "It's a distraction. It's like saying, 'This is all we have. Forget the rest.' It's like a 400-pound comedian on stage telling fat jokes. The audience is paying more attention to the jokes than to what they see."

In Monroeville, the dramas were intense but small-scale and persistent. The year the book came out all the schools were segregated and they remained so for the next five years. And once the schools were integrated in 1965, the white private school Monroe Academy was established not long after. Race relations had been generally good, and apart from the Freedom Riders from the North (which Nelle Lee disparaged at the time as agitators), there were no major racial incidents, only the threat of them.

"Most whites thought, 'You're good in your place. Stay there and you're a good nigger,'" H.B. said. "Of course it was an inferior situation, a double standard all over."

And eating slowly he was provoked to a reminiscence, recalling how in December 1959 the Monroeville Christmas parade was canceled, because the Klan had warned that if the band from the black high school marched with whites, there would be blood. To be fair, all the whites I spoke to in Monroeville condemned this lamentable episode. Later, in 1965, the Klan congregated on Drewry Road, wearing sheets and hoods, 40 or 50 of them, and they marched down Drewry to the Old Courthouse. "Right past my house," H.B. said. "My children stood on the porch and called out to them." This painful memory was another reason he had no interest in the novel, then in its fifth year of bestsellerdom.

"This was a white area. Maids could walk the streets, but if the residents saw a black man they'd call the sheriff, and then take you to jail," Arthur Penn said.

And what a sheriff. Up to the late 1950s, it was Sheriff Charlie Sizemore, noted for his bad temper. How bad? "He'd slap you upside the head, cuss you out, beat you."

One example: A prominent black pastor, N.H. Smith, was talking to another black man, Scott Nettles, on the corner of Claiborne and Mount Pleasant, the center of Monroeville, and steps from the stately courthouse, just chatting. "Sizemore comes up and slaps the cigarette out of Nettles' mouth and cusses him out, and why? To please the white folks, to build a reputation."

That happened in 1948, in this town of long memories.

H.B. and Arthur gave me other examples, all exercises in degradation, but here is a harmonious postscript to it all. In the early '60s, Sizemore-a Creek Indian, great-grandson to William Weatherford, Chief Red Eagle-became crippled and had a conversion. As an act of atonement, Sizemore went down to Clausell, to the main house of worship, Bethel Baptist Church, and begged the black congregation for forgiveness.

Out of curiosity, and against the advice of several whites I met in town, I visited Clausell, the traditionally black section of town. When Nelle Lee was a child, the woman who bathed and fed her was Hattie Belle Clausell, the so-called mammy in the Lee household, who walked from this settlement several miles every day to the house on South Alabama Avenue in the white part of town (the Lee house is now gone, replaced by Mel's Dairy Dream and a defunct swimming pool-supply store). Clausell was named for that black family.

I stopped at Franky D's Barber and Style Shop on Clausell Road, because barbers know everything. There I was told that I could find Irma, Nelle's former housekeeper, up the road, "in the projects."

The projects was a cul-de-sac of brick bungalows, low-cost housing, but Irma was not in any of them.

"They call this the 'hood," Brittany Bonner told me-she was on her porch, watching the rain come down. "People warn you about this place, but it's not so bad. Sometimes we hear guns-people shooting in the woods. You see that cross down the road? That's for the man they call 'James T'-James Tunstall. He was shot and killed a few years ago right there, maybe drug-related."

A white man in Monroeville told me that Clausell was so dangerous that the police never went there alone, but always in twos. Yet Brittany, 22, mother of two small girls, said that violence was not the problem. She repeated the town's lament: "We have no work, there are no jobs."

Brittany's great-aunt Jacqueline Packer thought I might find Irma out at Pineview Heights, down Clausell Road, but all I found were a scattering of houses, some bungalows and many dogtrot houses, and rotting cars, and a sign on a closed roadside café, "Southern Favorites-Neckbones and Rice, Turkey Necks and Rice," and then the pavement ended and the road was red clay, velvety in the rain, leading into the pinewoods.

Back in town I saw a billboard with a stern message: "Nothing in this country is free. If you're getting something without paying for it, Thank a Taxpayer." Toward the end of my stay in Monroeville, I met the Rev. Thomas Lane Butts, former pastor of the First United Methodist Church, where Nelle Lee and her sister, Alice, had been members of his congregation, and his dear friends.

"This town is no different from any other," he told me. He was 85, and had traveled throughout the South, and knew what he was talking about. Born ten miles east in what he called "a little two-mule community" of Bermuda (Ber-moo-dah in the local pronunciation), his father had been a tenant farmer-corn, cotton, vegetables. "We had no land, we had nothing. We didn't have electricity until I was in the 12th grade, in the fall of 1947. I studied by oil lamp."

The work paid off. After theology studies at Emory and Northwestern, and parishes in Mobile and Fort Walton Beach, Florida, and civil rights struggles, he became pastor of this Methodist church.

"We took in racism with our mother's milk," he said. But he'd been a civil rights campaigner from early on, even before 1960 when in Talladega he met Martin Luther King Jr. "He was the first black person I'd met who was not a field hand," he said. "The embodiment of erudition, authority and humility."

Rev. Butts had a volume of Freud in his lap the day I met him, searching for a quotation in Civilization and Its Discontents.

I told him the essay was one of my own favorites, for Freud's expression about human pettiness and discrimination, "the narcissism of minor differences"-the subtext of the old segregated South, and of human life in general.

His finger on the page, Rev. Butts murmured some sentences, "'The element of truth behind all this...men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved...can defend themselves...a powerful share of aggressiveness...' Ah here it is. ' Homo homini lupus...Man is a wolf to man.'"

That was the reality of history, as true in proud Monroeville as in the wider world. And that led us to talk about the town, the book, the way things are. He valued his friendship with H.B. Williams: the black teacher, the white clergyman, both in their 80s, both of them civil rights stalwarts. He had been close to the Lee family, had spent vacations in New York City with Nelle, and still saw her. An affectionately signed copy of the novel rested on the side table, not far from his volume of Freud.

"Here we are," he intoned, raising his hands, "tugged between two cultures, one gone and never to return, the other being born. Many things here have been lost. To Kill A Mockingbird keeps us from complete oblivion."

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What's Changed, and What Hasn't, in the Town That Inspired 'To Kill a Mockingbird'

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Traveling back in time to visit Harper Lee's hometown, the setting of her 1960 masterpiece and the controversial sequel hitting bookstores soon

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Monroeville

Monroeville is located in south Alabama between Montgomery and Mobile and serves as the county seat of Monroe County. The city was named for Monroe County, previously named in honor of President James Monroe. Today, Monroeville is considered the "Literary Capital of Alabama" because it has been home to literary giants Harper Lee and Truman Capote. Monroeville has a mayor-council form of government consisting of an elected mayor and nine council members.

What is now known as Monroeville once was called Burnt Corn Springs. Because of continuous conflicts among England, Spain, and the Native American groups in the area, the only major settlements in what was at the time the Mississippi Territory were along the Tombigbee River. These lands were ceded to the English by the Choctaw Nation in 1765. By 1795, Secretary of State James Monroe negotiated the purchase of this area from Spain.

For a number of years, the area of Monroeville was known as Walker's Mill and Store, named for the area's first settler, Major Walker, who built a store, a tavern, and a grist mill there. In

Old Monroe County Courthouse

1831, Probate Judge Henry W. Taylor received a land grant of 80 acres from the U.S. government, from which the town subsequently developed. By 1832, the county seat was moved to Walker's Mill and Store from Claiborne, which had served as the county seat for 22 years. After becoming the county seat, the town's name was briefly changed to Centerville because it was located at the "center" of the county. The town was then renamed Monroeville after all the legal papers were transferred from Claiborne.

In 1833, the first courthouse burned and all records were lost. A new courthouse was constructed by enslaved laborers with bricks made locally in the 1850s. Despite its status as the county seat, Monroeville was not officially incorporated until April 15, 1899. This 1850s courthouse burned in 1928 but was restored and remained in use until 1963, when the current courthouse was built. The old courthouse currently houses the Monroeville Area Chamber of Commerce and the Monroe County Heritage Museum.

At the Civil War's end in 1865, Monroeville began a rebuilding effort that continued until 1900. The early years of the twentieth century were difficult economic times for Monroeville. Many locals grew cotton on small farms, and northern companies exploited the area's timber. Steamboat traffic along the Alabama River between Mobile and Selma initially was an important contributor to the economic development in the area. But with the construction of the L&N Railroad from Pensacola to Selma, river port towns such as Claiborne saw an economic downturn. This proved to be a boon to Monroeville's economy as many people began to move inland to the city because of the railroad. From 1912 to 1952, the M&R Railroad, connected to the L&N Railroad, carried freight to and from Monroeville.

In 1928, the first airport was built, but it did not have paved runways until 1932 or a hangar until 1937. This airport was used during World War II for military training and today serves as the Monroe County Airport, officially established in 1967.

In the 1920s, the first hospital in Monroe County was in the private home of Maggey Bussey, a registered nurse in Monroeville. Also, in 1923, city water and electric power were brought to Monroeville. Sewage service for the town came around 1930, although only the jail and courthouse had plumbing for some time. In 1934, the streets were paved, and in 1938 the first traffic lights were installed. The current city hall was built in 1940.

Early industries included merchandising, agriculture, steam shipping, timber, sawmills,

Vanity Fair Plant in Monroeville

turpentine, and later automobile manufacturing. In 1937, Vanity Fair apparel manufacturers came to Monroeville, opening the first sewing plant in the area and serving as the town's first major industry. In 1977, the town saw the opening of the Georgia-Pacific plant, and Alabama River Pulp opened in nearby Claiborne.

Monroeville's population according to the 2010 Census was 6,519. Of that number, 55.7 percent identified themselves as African American, 42.1 percent as white, 0.8 percent as Hispanic or Latino, 0.3 percent as Native American, 0.3 percent as Asian, and 1.2 percent as two or more races. The city's median household income was $31,593, and per capita income was $20,553.

The workforce in present-day Monroeville is divided among the following occupational categories:

· Manufacturing (25.0 percent)
· Educational services, and health care and social assistance (20.4 percent)
· Professional, scientific, management, and administrative and waste management services (9.4 percent)
· Retail trade (8.8 percent)
· Other services, except public administration (6.1 percent)
· Construction (5.6 percent)
· Arts, entertainment, recreation, and accommodation and food services (4.9 percent)
· Finance, insurance, and real estate, rental, and leasing (4.6 percent)
· Transportation and warehousing and utilities (4.6 percent)
· Public administration (4.1 percent)
· Information (2.4 percent)
· Wholesale trade (2.4 percent)
· Agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, and extractive (1.8 percent)

Schools in Monroeville are part of the Monroe County school district; the town has approximately 2,046 students and 114 teachers in one elementary school (pre-K-2), one middle school, (3-5), one junior high school (6-8) and one high school (9-12). The city also has an alternative school (K-12) and a career/technical center (7-12). Two private schools (both pre-K-12) serve approximately 739 students with 53 teachers. Alabama Southern Community College in Monroeville offers two-year associate's degrees or certification in a variety of programs.

The Monroe County Airport is located near Monroeville and is a public airport owned by Monroe County, averaging 55 general aviation flights a day. Monroeville is also served by two major highways. Alabama Highway 21 runs northeast to southwest and merges in Monroeville with Alabama Highway 41, which runs northwest to southeast toward I-65. Also, the Alabama Railroad Company and the Alabama and Gulf Coast Railway run through the city of Monroeville.

Events and Places of Interest

To Kill a Mockingbird Outdoor Stage Set

Nelle Harper Lee was born in Monroeville on April 28, 1926, where she grew up as the youngest child of four. She became a renowned author after publishing To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961. Truman Capote was a close friend of Harper Lee's and frequently visited Monroeville during the summers of his childhood. Because of his time in Monroeville, Alabama became the setting of many of his works. In addition, novelist Mark Childress and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Cynthia Tucker were born in Monroeville.

In Monroeville today, there are events and attractions that celebrate the literary history and culture of the town. The Old Courthouse Museum is located in the Old Monroe County Courthouse in the Monroeville town square. A play based on Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is performed there each May by a local group called the Mockingbird Players. There are three permanent exhibits at the museum: on the courthouse itself, on Truman Capote's childhood in the town, and of course on Harper Lee. Also, in downtown Monroeville, the Chamber of Commerce sponsors the annual Mockingbird Market, which includes food, jewelry, glassware, silver, linens, and other goods.

In February, the Heritage Arts Festival turns the historic downtown square into a place for crafts, quilts, woodworking, soul food, and art. The event also includes a fashion show, gospel music, and a variety of dance performances. In March, citizens of Monroeville participate in the Alabama River Heritage Days, an event featuring Creek traditions, 1812 frontier camps, river music, and events at the Alabama River Museum, located 20 miles north of Monroeville. In April, Monroeville hosts the annual "Peddlin' for a Cure," a 100-mile bike ride to Mobile, Montgomery, and other areas that raises money for the American Cancer Society. In October, the Monroe County Fair is held at the fairgrounds in Monroeville. Every first Saturday in December, the City of Monroeville sponsors a Christmas parade, holiday market, and tree lighting in the Downtown Square, and at the end of the day's festivities, the mayor gives the annual Christmas address.
Additional Resources

The Heritage of Monroe County, Alabama. Clanton, Ala.: Heritage Publishing Consultants, 2001.

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MonroevilleMonroeville is located in south Alabama between Montgomery and Mobile and serves as the county seat of Monroe County. The city was named for Monroe County, previously named in honor of President James Monroe. Today, Monroeville is considered the "Literary Capital of Alabama" because it has been home to literary giants Harper Lee and Truman Capote.

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Many images of historical Monroeville. Includes the celebratory plans for Lee's "Go Set a Watchman."

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As an owner of the only secular bookstore in Harper Lee's Alabama hometown, Monroeville, Spencer Madrie figured he'd sell hundreds of books -- maybe more -- after the stunning announcement that the author was releasing a sequel to her 1960 blockbuster "To Kill a Mockingbird."

Five months later, more than 7,000 copies of Lee's new novel "Go Set a Watchman" are headed to Madrie's Ol' Curiosities & Book Shoppe, located in a converted three-bedroom house near the courthouse square in Monroeville. He had to buy a new building across the street just to store all the books, many of which he will ship to online purchasers.

"We've sold to a bunch of different countries around the world and, of course, a ton of them in the United States," said Madrie. "That's exciting when you think that so many people care so much about a book release."

It's doubtful people anywhere care more than in Monroeville, a southwest Alabama town of 6,300 and the model for Scout Finch's hometown of Maycomb in both books.

"For me and my generation this is the 'To Kill a Mockingbird' of our generation, so this is history for us," said 25-year-old Hannah Hood, a Monroeville native and office manager at the local chamber of commerce.

Questions arose earlier this year as soon as the publisher Harper revealed plans for "Watchman," which was written before "Mockingbird" and apparently sat in storage for decades. The upcoming book traces the lead character Scout's return home about two decades after father Atticus Finch defended a black man wrongly convicted of raping a white woman in the 1930s.

Scout has a boyfriend named Hank in the new novel, and her older brother Jem is dead, according to an excerpt released Friday by the publisher. As in "Mockingbird," the new book parallels parts of Lee's life.

The new book was announced just weeks after the death of Lee's sister and longtime protector, Alice Finch Lee, and the author still hasn't commented publicly aside from written statements released through the publisher or Lee's current attorney, Tonja Carter.

The publisher's and Carter's claims aside, some in town still doubt the 89-year-old Lee really wants to release "Watchman," a 1950s manuscript which contained the seeds that later became "Mockingbird" at an editor's suggestion.

Still, many residents are excited about the new book.

Madrie expects to get his first shipment of 4,000 books in an 18-wheeler on Monday, and the store will open at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday to begin selling books at the first moment allowed by the publisher. Each novel sold by Madrie's shop will come with an embossed emblem and a certificate showing it was purchased in Lee's hometown.

Madrie has strung lights across the store's front lawn for an early-morning shindig and is bringing in an Atticus Finch impersonator who also sings Dean Martin songs on the side. Madrie hopes to close around 2 a.m. before reopening the shop a few hours later for more sales, but he isn't counting on it.

"I know how people like to linger after a party," said Madrie.

A couple blocks away, volunteers will begin public readings of "Watchman" at 7 a.m. Tuesday in the old county courtroom, a childhood hangout for Lee and the model for the courtroom in the film version of "Mockingbird." Walking tours will be conducted around town pointing out sites mentioned in both books.

There will also be talks, refreshments, an evening cocktail hour with mint juleps and story-telling at the public library, which was a hotel 55 years ago when actor Gregory Peck came to town with his wife to get a feel for his character in the movie, Atticus Finch, who was based on Lee's father, the late A.C. Lee.

The author lives in an assisted living home just a few miles from downtown, yet she is in declining health and rarely makes public appearances. Even more so, Lee values her privacy and doesn't care for media attention; she gave her last interview in 1964.

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Where is Monroeville, Alabama? Harper Lee hometown the center of attention again...

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As an owner of the only secular bookstore in Harper Lee's Alabama hometown, Monroeville, Spencer Madrie figured he'd sell hundreds of books -- maybe more -- after the stunning announcement that the author was releasing a sequel to her 1960...

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50 Years after the debut of To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee's Alabama hometown celebrates (carefully) the book that made it famous. Article: Mike Wilson

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Controversy in small town Alabama after closing down the annual performance of "To Kill a Mockingbird" in the town courthouse.

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The town of Monroeville is "To Kill a Mockingbird."

It is the self-described Literary Capital of the World, where writers buy bottles of water just for the hope that some magic will seep in. It's a place where you can buy a burger at a restaurant named Radley's, where you are introduced to people by name, and by the character they played in the community production of "Mockingbird."
That's Dr. Grider. He played Mr. Cunningham.
For 27 years the play based on Harper Lee's great work has played outside the old Monroe County Courthouse, and inside the courtroom where you can just imagine Atticus Finch convincing the world, if not a jury, that justice should be more powerful than a town's conventions.

But in a room behind that very courtroom, members of the Monroe County Museum Board today heard catastrophic news.

After this year they will no longer be awarded the rights to produce To Kill a Mockingbird in Monroeville. Hopes of a compromise with the play's publishing company have been dashed.

It is stunning, devastating news in this part of the world.

"The less said the better. We don't need this in the headlines," said board member Sandy Smith, head of the Monroe County Chamber of Commerce (who stared with the ice of "Mockingbird's" Mrs. Dubose when she saw a reporter behind her).

But I don't blame her. The bottom line is grim.

Board President Tom Lomenick said he has had multiple talks with Dramatic Publishing Co. of Illinois, which licenses the play. The publishing company has been emphatic.

"Right now there is no licensing agreement for any group in Monroeville," Lomenick said. After this year's productions are over - unless something dramatically changes - the show in Monroeville, home of Harper Lee and the model for her Maycomb, will not go on.

The publishing company told Lomenick it would award the rights to a group in Kentucky, and the players from Monroeville could travel to the Bluegrass state to perform, but it would not be licensed in Monroeville.

"If they are willing to grant the rights to a group in Kentucky, there are underlying reasons or individuals behind this," said board member Harry Gaston - who played Atticus in the community presentation.

It is a community gut punch.

The town and the play are siblings that have grown up together. As one museum worker put it, "We are inseparable."

The play drives tourism, pulling in about $200,000 a year in ticket sales, plus hotels and restaurants and tours, gas stations, everything. Townspeople swear that Harry Potter author JK Rowling came to the show, and sure enough the guest book is signed by a "JK Rowling - London."

Dr. John Grider, a veterinarian who played the role of Mr. Cunningham (who personified the humanity of the TKAM mob) said the town hit economic hard times after textile plants closed years ago, and the play has added a monetary and psychological boost.

Without money from the play the museum will lose staff and services, Lomenick said.

But what was said about the closing does not cover all the things that were not said.

The museum board went into executive session after the announcement, claiming it had to discuss a good name and character issue. None of the members would discuss it.

There have been hard feelings over the years. In 2013, Harper Lee sued the museum over trademark infringement on souvenirs sold in the gift shop. And though that case was eventually settled, hard feelings remain.

It is sad. As sad as Tom Robinson himself.

A second book of Lee's will soon be published, but the relationship between the town and its most admired and famous citizen remains tense, stretched, complicated.

There are few events in Alabama as genuinely touching as Monroeville's community play. The characters are volunteers, just people. But somehow those characters become the town of Monroeville, and Monroeville - or is it Maycomb - becomes the character.

Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird are Alabama treasures. Of that there is no doubt.

But so is this play, in this place.

If there is justice - if Lee is truly of sound mind and if Atticus Finch could ever really lead us to the right place - they must work this out.

There is too much at stake.

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Monroeville board: No more 'To Kill a Mockingbird' after this year

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The town of Monroeville is "To Kill a Mockingbird." It is the self-described Literary Capital of the World, where writers buy bottles of water just for the hope that some magic will seep in.

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The play is saved.

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Ms. Lee never attended the play, and her decision to take back control of the production is viewed by many here as residue from a trademark fight she had with the museum several years ago. She sued the museum in 2013 because, among other things, she thought some items it sold, such as "Mockingbird" mugs, traded on the reputation of her novel. The museum fought back, but in a settlement agreed to pay royalties and to regular audits of its gift shop. It later sent a letter of apology.

Ms. Lee's lawyer, Tonja Carter, has denied that the author had any role in stripping the museum of the play. In an email last year to the museum's board president, she said that decision had rested with the company that licenses the stage adaptation - and she did not think she could stop it.

But Christopher Sergel III, the president of that company, Dramatic Publishing, said in an interview last week that he only pulled the license as a courtesy to Ms. Lee. He said one of Ms. Lee's representatives had called him a few years back and told him she did not like the museum's production.

"I was told Harper Lee was involved in forming a nonprofit in town to handle the play using the same actors as before," he said. "Absent the desire from the Harper Lee camp, I would not have terminated the contract. If Harper Lee wanted to produce this herself in her hometown, how could I have argued with that?"

None of the twists and turns in the back story of the play hurt its reception Friday, where the sold-out crowd stood and applauded at its conclusion, when Atticus shares a final reflection with his daughter, Scout.

"It's business as usual for the play," said George Landegger, an industrialist and philanthropist who has been active in Monroeville's affairs. "Nothing has changed; it is essentially the same cast. And of course, the public remains excited about it."

The play has already sold out 8 of its 12 performances, though Jane Busby, the director, said the pace of sales over the past six weeks has been slower than in recent memory, perhaps because of the new method of selling online. Last year, the performances sold out in five days, owing in part to the excitement over publication of Ms. Lee's second book, " Go Set a Watchman."

The play has long been an economic boon to this town of about 6,300, drawing thousands of visitors during the five weeks each spring that it is performed. As the producer each year, the museum took in as much as $200,000 in revenues from ticket sales, nearly half of its former annual budget.

This year the museum will receive just the rent for the continued use of its headquarters, the old courthouse, to stage the play. Ms. Lee's nonprofit, Mockingbird Company, is paying $48,000 in rent, down from the $63,000 that the museum said it needed to cover expenses. Without the full proceeds from the ticket sales, and a drop in money from the county, the museum had to cut two positions and increasingly relies on volunteers to assist in the gift shop and to lead tours.

Ms. Carter, who runs the nonprofit, said Friday that the plan is to donate proceeds from the play to local charities, including the Monroe County Public Library, which she said needed an infusion of funds.

Ms. Carter remains something of a polarizing figure in this town, where many respect the dutiful care she provided for the author and others complain that she is spiteful and has used her power as Ms. Lee's representative to settle scores.

Stephanie Rogers, who was the executive director of the museum, said she believes her firing last summer by the Monroe County Commission, the local government panel, was influenced by Ms. Carter. Ms. Rogers also thinks Ms. Carter resented that the museum had fought the trademark suit.

Ms. Carter has denied any role in the firing. The commission's chairman, Greg Norris, and Tom Lomenick, the museum's board president at the time, have said she played no role.

But in emails to Mr. Norris last year, obtained through a public record request, Mr. Lomenick cited several reasons he thought Ms. Rogers should be fired. She was, among other things, he wrote, going out of her way to antagonize the new nonprofit producers of the play by, he said, doing things like hiding props. "You and the commissioners have got to step up for the good of the county and city," Mr. Lomenick told Mr. Norris. "We could lose the play all together if Tonja gets mad enough."

Ms. Rogers, in an interview, denied hiding the props.

Earlier this year Scott Rudin, the producer, announced that he is bringing a second stage adaptation of the play, written by Aaron Sorkin, to Broadway next year. Mr. Sergel said Dramatic's Mockingbird adaptation, which his grandfather wrote and which has been performed all over the world, will continue to be widely produced in amateur and regional theaters.

Ms. Carter said Friday that she hopes to take the Sergel adaptation on the road to England next year. But wherever it travels, she said, she envisions it at the museum as well.

"It will always be here as far as I can see," she said.

That was good news to cast members, some of whom had said they feared the nonprofit might ultimately decide that the play should take up residence in, say, Montgomery, at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival there. Ms. Carter said it would be wonderful if the play eventually was performed there, too.

Residents said the play retains a special authenticity when it is performed in the old courthouse - the sense that the audience is breathing the very same air as Atticus and Scout as they confronted the racism of Alabama in the 1930s.

"I've seen productions in Hong Kong and Pell City," Ala., said Tim McKenzie, the new president of the museum who has acted in the play for eight years. "Nothing is like it is here."

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Jennifer Crossley Howard and Serge F. Kovaleski

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A 'Mockingbird' Reopens in Alabama, and Drama Plays Out

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Ms. Lee never attended the play, and her decision to take back control of the production is viewed by many here as residue from a trademark fight she had with the museum several years ago. She sued the museum in 2013 because, among other things, she thought some items it sold, such as "Mockingbird" mugs, traded on the reputation of her novel.

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Monroeville in the 1930s compared to present day Monroeville

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What was Monroeville, Ala., like in the 1930s when little Nelle Harper Lee was growing up, forming the memories she would use as the inspiration for her 1960 novel "To Kill a Mockingbird?"

Was it really like the fictional Maycomb, where the book is set? Did it look like the sound-stage sets created for the classic 1962 film based on the book?

In a 1962 interview with New York Herald Tribune, Lee said of the book's setting: "What I did present as exactly as I could were the clime and tone, as I remember them, of the town in which I lived. From childhood on, I did sit in the courtroom watching my father argue cases and talk to juries."

The action in "Mockingbird" took place from 1933-1935, beginning when its protagonist, Scout Finch, was 6 years old. Harper Lee, known in her hometown as "Nelle," would have turned 7 in April of 1933.

Today, a few sites from Lee's childhood still exist and draw thousands of tourists who come to the town each year on "Mockingbird" pilgrimages. The 1903 courthouse is now a museum and much of downtown business district is intact. Lee's high school and the home where she lived as an adult remain.
Click here to read "Monroeville Writers Trail: What to see when you visit for 'Go Set a Watchman' launch."
But many more sites from the 1930s are lost to time. Before the July 14 release of the Lee's much-anticipated second novel, "Go Set a Watchman," let's get a feel for Monroe County during the Depression.
Monroeville then and now
Monroeville has struggled economically since the 2009 closing of one of its largest industries, a Vanity Fair Brands dye and finishing plant. Its population has begun a slow downward slide, from about 6,500 in 2010 to an estimated 6,200 in 2013, according to Census records.

When Nelle Harper Lee was born April 28, 1926, about 1,200 people lived in Monroeville and 30,000 in Monroe County. The largely rural county is dotted with tiny towns and communities with names like Burnt Corn, Scratch Ankle, Excel, Beatrice, Frisco City, Vredenburgh, Mexia and Perdue Hill. According to Marja Mills in the book "The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee," the Lee family loved taking long country drives through these small places with quirky names.

Claiborne, a once-bustling Monroe County burg 13 miles from Monroeville, had already faded to status of ghost town before Lee was born, having been heavily looted during the Civil War and then bypassed by the railroad. Today, it is a historic site with the 1830s James Dellet Plantation home as its centerpiece.

Monroeville's quaint downtown would have looked similar to its current appearance, with shops lining the square around the courthouse. The 1903 courthouse was replaced by an updated building in the 1960s and was nearly demolished before being renovated to its 1930s appearance and opened as a museum honoring "To Kill a Mockingbird," Lee and Monroeville native Truman Capote, Lee's childhood friend and neighbor.

The building where Lee attended high school is also still standing. It is located on York Street near the West Avenue home where Lee lived as an adult. Before 1936, the high school was on the site of the current Monroeville Elementary School. The new school on York served as the high school until a new one was built in 1978 and the building on York became the junior high, which it remains today.

Click through the accompanying gallery of vintage photos of Monroe County to see how it would have looked in Lee's childhood.

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Depression-era Monroe County: When Harper Lee was young

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What was Monroeville, Ala., like in the 1930s when little Nelle Harper Lee was growing up, forming the memories she would use as the inspiration for her 1960 novel "To Kill a Mockingbird?" Was it really like the fictional Maycomb, where the book is set?

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Articles, Videos and Speeches relating to segregation

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Jim Crow Laws - Facts & Summary - HISTORY.com

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Find out more about the history of Jim Crow Laws, including videos, interesting articles, pictures, historical features and more. Get all the facts on HISTORY.com

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“It shall be unlawful for a negro and white person to play together or in company with each other in any game of cards or dice, dominoes or checkers.” —Birmingham, Alabama, 1930

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Primary source materials - interviews given by those effected by Jim Crow Laws

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After the American Civil War most states in the South passed anti-African American legislation. These became known as Jim Crow laws. This included laws that discriminated against African Americans with concern to attendance in public schools and the use of facilities such as restaurants, theaters, hotels, cinemas and public baths. Trains and buses were also segregated and in many states marriage between whites and African American people.

Jim Crow laws were tested in 1896 by Homer Plessey when convicted in Louisiana for riding in a white only railway car. Plessey took his case to the Supreme Court but the justices voted in favour of the Louisiana Court. William B. Brown established the legality of segregation as long as facilities were kept "separate but equal". Only one of the justices, John Harlan, disagreed with this decision.

In the early 1950s the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People concentrated on bringing an end to segregation on buses and trains. In 1952 segregation on inter-state railways was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. This was followed in 1954 by a similar judgment concerning inter-state buses. However, states in the Deep South continued their own policy of transport segregation. This usually involved whites sitting in the front and blacks sitting nearest to the front had to give up their seats to any whites that were standing.

African American people who disobeyed the state's transport segregation policies were arrested and fined. In 1956 African Americans, led by Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, organised the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Transport segregation continued in some parts of the Deep South, so in 1961, a civil rights group, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) began to organize Freedom Rides. After three days of training in non-violent techniques, black and white volunteers sat next to each other as they travelled through the Deep South. On their journeys they also campaigned against other forms of racial discrimination. They sat together, in segregated restaurants, lunch counters and hotels. This was especially effective when it concerned large companies who, fearing boycotts in the North, began to desegregate their businesses.

In 1964, President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, managed to persuade Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act. This made racial discrimination in public places, such as theaters, restaurants and hotels, illegal. It also required employers to provide equal employment opportunities. Projects involving federal funds could now be cut off if there was evidence of discriminated based on colour, race or national origin.

Vending-machine in Jackson, Tennessee

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Primary Sources

(1) Ida Wells (1862-1931), an African American journalist, was one of the leaders of the fight against Jim Crow laws.

In the ten years succeeded the Civil War thousands of Negroes were murdered for the crime of casting a ballot. As a consequence their vote is entirely nullified throughout the entire South. The laws of the Southern states make it a crime for whites and Negroes to inter-marry or even ride in the same railway carriage. Both crimes are punishable by fine and imprisonment. The doors of churches, hotels, concert halls and reading rooms are alike closed against the Negro as a man, but every place is open to him as a servant.

(2) Boston Blackwell, aged 98 from North Little Rock, Arkansas, interviewed as part of the Federal Writers Project in 1937.

Them Ku Kluxers was terrible - what they done to people. Oh, God, they was bad. They come sneaking up and run you out of your house and take everything you had. They was rough on the women and children. People all wanted to stay close by where soldiers was. I sure knowed they was my friend.

Now you wants to know about this voting business. I voted for General Grant. Army men come around and registered you before voting time. It wasn't no trouble to vote them days; white and black all voted together. All you had to do was tell who you was vote for and they give you a colored ticket. All the men up had different colored tickets. If you voted for Grant, you get his color. It was easy. They was colored men in office, plenty. Colored legislators, and colored circuit clerks, and colored county clerks. They sure was some big officers colored in them times. They was all my friends. This here used to be a good county, but I tell you it sure is tough now. I think it's wrong - exactly wrong that we can't vote now. The Jim Crow law, it put us out. The Constitution of the United States, it give us the right to vote. It made us citizens, it did.

One of the points in which I was especially interested was the Jim Crow regulations, that is, the system of separation of the races in street cars and railroad trains.

I was curious to see how the system worked out in Atlanta. Over the door of each car, I found the sign: "White people will seat from front of car toward the back and colored people from toward front". Sure enough, I found the white people in front and the Negroes behind.

As the sign indicates, there is no definite line of division between the white seats and the black seats, as in many other Southern cities. This very absence of a clear demarcation is significant of many relationships in the South. The colour line is drawn, but neither race knows just where it is. Indeed, it can hardly be definitely drawn in many relationships, because it is constantly changing. This uncertainty is a fertile source of friction and bitterness.

The very first time I was on a car in Atlanta, I saw the conductor - all conductors are white - ask a Negro woman to get up and take a seat farther back in order to make a place for a white man. I have also seen white men requested to leave the Negro section of the car.

"We pay first-class fare," said one of the leading Negroes in Atlanta, "exactly as the white man does, but we don't get first-class service. I say it isn't fair."

Charles T. Hopkins, a leader in the Civic League and one of the prominent lawyers of the city, told me that he believed the Negroes should be given their definite seats in every car; he said that he personally made it a practice to stand up rather than to take any one of the four back seats, which he considered as belonging to the Negroes.

(4) During the First World War the Luftwaffe dropped leaflets from planes on black regiments from the United States.

What is democracy? Personal freedom, all citizens enjoying the same rights socially and before the law. Do you enjoy the same rights as the white people in America, the land of Freedom and Democracy, or are you rather not treated over there as a second-class citizen? Can you go into a restaurant where white people dine? Can you get a seat in the theatre where white people sit? Is lynching a lawful proceeding in a democratic country?

(5) Richard Wright was born in Mississippi. At the age of fifteen he moved to Chicago and later he described what it was like to travel for the first time on non-segregated transport.

We see white men and women get on the train, dressed in expensive new clothes. We look at them guardedly and wonder will they bother us. Will they ask us to stand up while they sit down? Will they tell us to go to the back of the coach? Even though we have been told that we need not to be afraid, we have lived so long in fear of all white faces that we cannot help but sit and wait. We look around the train and we do not see the old familiar signs: "For Colored" and "For White".

Then we board our first Yankee streetcar to go to a cousin's home. We pay the conductor our fare and look about where we please, but we were still scared. We cannot shake off 300 years of fear in three hours. We ease into a seat and look out of the window at the crowded streets. A white man or woman comes and sits besides us, not even looking at us, as though this was a normal thing to do. The muscles of our bodies tighten. Indefinable sensations crawl over our skins and our blood tingles. Out of the corners of our eyes we try to get a glimpse of the strange white face that floats but a few inches from ours.

(6) Agnes Smedley, letter to Aino Taylor (7th December, 1942)

The treatment of Negroes in the south has humiliated and shamed me so deeply that my blood runs cold in my veins. Traveling by bus, with the rain pouring, the driver ordered a dozen Negroes to step back and let two handsome white women aboard first. They came on, then the driver saw they had Negro blood in their veins - perhaps their hair showed it. The driver slapped his leg and bawled with laughter and said to the white passengers: "Now ain't that a joke! I thought they was white and they are Niggers." The faces of t he two women and of all the colored passengers were frozen. Mine froze too. Some of the white passengers broke into a laugh at the joke.

I saw a northern white soldier ask a colored soldier to sit down by him and the latter did so; then the bus driver stopped the bus and said: "Stand up. Nigger!" The colored soldier stood up. The white soldier said: "Aw hell!" and stood up also. But had that white soldier not been in uniform, I don't know what would have happened.

Now when I heard this, I should have stood up and killed the driver. But I sat there petrified, sat there like a traitor to the human race. I kept thinking of what Jesus would have done, and knew that he would perhaps have allowed Himself to be killed. I didn't. I didn't do a thing for many reasons: because I was warned a dozen times by white people that if I did anything it would be the colored people who suffered for it. The whole south whispers if the least thing breaks out. In one town in Georgia a fight started in the colored section of the town. So great is the tension that the minute it started, the railway engine on the train began to toot, the air-raid sirens went off as if there was an air raid, police cars and motorcycles roared through the street, and I heard the firing of guns. A street fight starts such a night alarm.

(7) In his book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, Martin Luther King described how racial segregation was organised on buses in Alabama.

Frequently Negroes paid their fare at the front door, and then were forced to get off and reboard at the rear. An even more humiliating practice was the custom of forcing Negroes to stand over empty seats reserved for "whites only". Even if the bus had no white passengers, and Negroes were packed throughout, they were prohibited from sitting in the front four seats (which held ten persons). But the practice went further. If white persons were already occupying all of their reserved seats and additional white people boarded the bus. Negroes sitting in the unreserved section immediately behind the whites were asked to stand so that the whites could be seated. If the Negroes refused to stand and move back, they were arrested.

(8) Rosa Parks, interviewed by Howell Raines for the book My Soul is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered (1977)

I had left my work at the men's alteration shop, a tailor shop in the Montgomery Fair department store, and as I left work, I crossed the street to a drugstore to pick up a few items instead of trying to go directly to the bus stop. And when I had finished this, I came across the street and looked for a Cleveland Avenue bus that apparently had some seats on it. At that time it was a little hard to get a seat on the bus. But when I did get to the entrance of the bus, I got in line with a number of other people who were getting on the same bus.

As I got up on the bus and walked to the seat I saw there was only one vacancy that was just back of where it was considered the white section. So this was the seat that I took, next to the aisle, and a man was sitting next to me. Across the aisle there were two women, and there were a few seats at this point in the very front of the bus that was called the white section. I went on to one stop and I didn't particularly notice who was getting on the bus, didn't particularly notice the other people getting on. And on the third stop there were some people getting on, and at this point all of the front seats were taken. Now in the beginning, at the very first stop I had got on the bus, the back of the bus was filled up with people standing in the aisle and I don't know why this one vacancy that I took was left, because there were quite a few people already standing toward the back of the bus. The third stop is when all the front seats were taken, and this one man was standing and when the driver looked around and saw he was standing, he asked the four of us, the man in the seat with me and the two women across the aisle, to let him have those front seats.

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At his first request, didn't any of us move. Then he spoke again and said, "You'd better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats." At this point, of course, the passenger who would have taken the seat hadn't said anything. In fact, he never did speak to my knowledge. When the three people, the man who was in the seat with me and the two women, stood up and moved into the aisle, I remained where I was. When the driver saw that I was still sitting there, he asked if I was going to stand up. I told him, no, I wasn't. He said, "Well, if you don't stand up, I'm going to have you arrested." I told him to go on and have me arrested.

He got off the bus and came back shortly. A few minutes later, two policemen got on the bus, and they approached me and asked if the driver had asked me to stand up, and I said yes, and they wanted to know why I didn't. I told them I didn't think I should have to stand up. . . . They placed me under arrest then and had me to get in the police car, and I was taken to jail.

(9) James Eastland, representative from Mississippi, speech in the United States Senate (27th May, 1954)

The southern institution of racial segregation or racial separation was the correct, self-evident truth which arose from the chaos and confusion of the reconstruction period. Separation promotes racial harmony. It permits each race to follow its own pursuits, and its own civilization. Segregation is not discrimination. Segregation is not a badge of racial inferiority, and that it is not is recognized by both races in the Southern States. In fact, segregation is desired and supported by the vast majority of the members of both races in the South, who dwell side by side under harmonious conditions.

The negro has made a great contribution to the South. We take pride in the constant advance he has made. It is where social questions are involved that Southern people draw the line. It is these social institutions with which Southern people, in my judgment, will not permit the Supreme Court to tamper.

Let me make this clear, Mr. President: There is no racial hatred in the South. The Negro race is not an oppressed race. A great Senator from the State of Idaho, Senator William E. Borah, a few years ago said on the floor of the Senate: "Let us admit that the South is dealing with this question as best it can, admit that the men and women of the South are just as patriotic as we are, just as devoted to the principles of the Constitution as we are, just as willing to sacrifice for the success of their communities as we are. Let us give them credit as American citizens, and cooperate with them, sympathize with them, and help them in the solution of their problem, instead of condemning them. We are one people, one nation, and they are entitled to be treated upon this basis."

Mr. President, it is the law of nature, it is the law of God, that every race has both the right and the duty to perpetuate itself. All free men have the right to associate exclusively with members of their own race, free from governmental interference, if they so desire. Free men have the right to send their children to schools of their own choosing, free from governmental interference and to build up their own culture, free from governmental interference. These rights are inherent in the Constitution of the United States and in the American system of government, both state and national, to promote and protect this right.

(10) Tom P. Brady, Black Monday, a booklet published by the Association of Citizens' Councils (1955)

"Black Monday" is the name coined by Representative John Bell Williams of Mississippi to designate Monday, May 17th, 1954, a date long to be remembered throughout this nation. This is the date upon which the Supreme Court of the United States handed down its socialistic decision in the Segregation cases on appeal from the States of Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia and Delaware.

"Black Monday" is indeed symbolic of the date. Black denoting darkness and terror. Black signifying the absence of light and wisdom. Black embodying grief, destruction and death. Should Representative Williams accomplish nothing more during his membership in Congress he has more than justified his years in office by the creating of this epithet, the originating of this watchword, the shouting of this battle cry.

Black Monday ranks in importance with July 4th, 1776, the date upon which our Declaration of Independence was signed. May 17th, 1954, is the date upon which the declaration of socialistic doctrine was officially proclaimed throughout this nation. It was on Black Monday that the judicial branch of our government usurped the sacred privilege and right of the respective states of this union to educate their youth. This usurpation constitutes the greatest travesty of the American Constitution and jurisprudence in the history of this nation.

(11) Elizabeth Eckford was one of the nine African American students who tried to enroll at Little Rock Central High School during September, 1957. She was later interviewed about her attempts to gain entry to the school on the first day of term.

The crowd was quiet. I guess they were waiting to see what was going to happen. When I was able to steady my knees, I walked up to the guard who had let the white students in. When I tried to squeeze past him, he raised his bayonet and then the other guards closed in and they raised their bayonets. They glared at me with a mean look and I was very frightened and didn't know what to do. I turned around and the crowd came toward me. Someone started yelling "lynch her!"

I tried to find a friendly face somewhere in the mob. I looked at her again she spat on me. They came closer, shouting, "No nigger bitch is going to get in our school! Get out of here!" Then I saw a bench at the bus stop. When I got there, I don't think I could have gone another step. I sat down and the mob crowded up and began shouting all over again. Just then a white man sat down beside me, put his arm around me and patted my shoulder. He raised my chin and said, "Don't let them see you cry."

(12) James Peck, a white member of the Freedom Riders, wrote about his experiences with his friend, the African American, Charles Person, in Birmingham on 14th May, 1961, in his book, Freedom Rider (1962)

Upon arrival in Birmingham I could see a mob lined up on the sidewalk only a few feet from the loading platform. Most of them were young - in their twenties. Some were carrying ill-concealed iron bars. All had hate showing on their faces.

I looked at them and then I looked at Charles Person, who had been designated as my team mate to test the lunch counter. When I looked at him, he responded by saying simply, "Let's go." As we entered the white waiting room and approached the lunch counter, we were grabbed bodily and pushed toward the alleyway and out of sight of onlookers in the waiting room, six of them started swinging at me with fists and pipes. Five others attacked Person a few feet ahead. Within seconds, I was unconscious on the ground.

(13) Fred Shuttlesworth led the campaign to desegregate buses in Birmingham, Alabama. An account of the campaign appeared in Birmingham: People in Motion (1966)

In May 1956 Alabama politicians "stood on the beach of history and tried to hold back the tide." They outlawed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in a desperate attempt to halt the movement for Negro equality. But their action had precisely the opposite effect. For almost immediately the Negroes of Birmingham came together to form a movement which during the last ten years has transformed life in Birmingham - which has shaken America.

"They could outlaw an organization, but they couldn't outlaw the movement of a people determined to be free," said the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, president of the new group. And at a mass meeting called by a committee of Negro ministers, the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) was born. Many Negroes in "the Johannesburg of North America" were afraid to join. But many others echoed the sentiments of Mrs. Rosa Walker, one of the first members: "I was frightened, but I figured we needed help to get us more jobs and better education. And we had the man here to help us."

But Christmas night, the night before the protest, the home of Rev. Shuttlesworth was bombed. The bed in which he was sleeping was directly over the spot where the bomb went off. The bed was blown to bits, but he escaped unhurt. Members of the ACMHR say he was saved to lead the movement.

Shuttlesworth took a neighbor who was hurt in the explosion to the hospital. Then he took a bus home - and he rode in front. The bombing strengthened the determination of his followers in the same way.

"On the 25th day of December, that's when they blew up Rev. Shuttlesworth's house," says Mrs. Walker. "And when I went to the meeting the next morning Rev. Shuttlesworth was the first thing I saw. And I knowed as how their house was blowed up, and I couldn't figure out how he was there. And I said then, that I'm going into it. And I went into it on that day."

More than 250 others "went into it" with Mrs. Walker. Twenty-one of them were arrested that day, one the following day. They were convicted and fined, and they then filed suit in federal court, in January, 1957.

The question of desegregating the buses wasn't over until late 1959. At that time, federal court rulings held the police were wrong in arresting Negroes who rode the buses integrated in 1958 and the Milwaukee couple who sat in the railroad station in 1959. But the segregation signs were still up, and by now ACMHR people knew that court rulings only come to life when people put their bodies on the line in a challenge to the old ways.

(14) John F. Kennedy, speech on television (11th June, 1963)

This nation was founded by men of many nations and backgrounds. It was founded on the principle that all men are created equal; and that the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened.

It ought to be possible, therefore, for American students of any color to attend any public institution they select without having to be backed up by troops. It ought to be possible for American consumers of any color to receive equal service in places of public accommodation, such as hotels and restaurants, and theaters and retail stores, without being forced to resort to demonstrations in the street.

And it ought to be possible for American citizens of any color to register and to vote in a free election without interference or fear of reprisal.

It ought to be possible, in short, for every American to enjoy the privileges of being American without regard to his race or his color.

This is not a sectional issue. Difficulties over segregation and discrimination exist in every city, in every state of the Union, producing in many cities a rising tide of discontent that threatens the public safety.

Nor is this a partisan issue. In a time of domestic crisis, men of goodwill and generosity should be able to unite regardless of party or politics.

This is not even a legal or legislative issue alone. It is better to settle these matters in the courts than on the streets, and new laws are needed at every level. But law alone cannot make men see right.

We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities; whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.

If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public; if he cannot send his children to the best public schools available; if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him; if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?

Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay? One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice; they are not yet freed from social and economic oppression.

And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

Now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise.

The events in Birmingham and elsewhere have so increased the cries for equality that no city or state or legislative body can prudently choose to ignore them.

The fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city, North and South. Where legal remedies are not at hand, redress is sought in the streets in demonstrations, parades and protests, which create tensions and threaten violence - and threaten lives.

We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and a people. It cannot be met by repressive police action. It cannot be left to increased demonstrations in the streets. It cannot be quieted by token moves or talk. It is a time to act in the Congress, in your state and local legislative body, and, above all, in all of our daily lives.

I am, therefore, asking the Congress to enact legislation giving all Americans the right to be served in facilities which are open to the public - hotels, restaurants and theaters, retail stores and similar establishments. This seems to me to be an elementary right.

I'm also asking Congress to authorize the Federal Government to participate more fully in lawsuits designed to end segregation in public education. We have succeeded in persuading many districts to desegregate voluntarily. Dozens have admitted Negroes without violence.

Other features will also be requested, including greater protection for the right to vote.

But legislation, I repeat, cannot solve this problem alone. It must be solved in the homes of every American in every community across our country.

In this respect, I want to pay tribute to those citizens, North and South, who've been working in their communities to make life better for all.

They are acting not out of a sense of legal duty but out of a sense of human decency. Like our soldiers and sailors in all parts of the world, they are meeting freedom's challenge on the firing line, and I salute them for their honor - their courage.

Water fountains in a Southern town in the 1950s.

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Read the essential details about the Jim Crow Laws. After the American Civil War most states in the South passed anti-African American legislation. These became known as Jim Crow laws. This included laws that discriminated against African Americans with concern to attendance in public schools and the use of facilities such as restaurants, theaters, hotels, cinemas and public baths.

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"All marriages between a white person and a negro, or between a white person and a person of negro descent to the fourth generation inclusive, are hereby forever prohibited,"--Florida.

"Separate free schools shall be established for the education of children of African descent; and it shall be unlawful for any colored child to attend any white school, or any white child to attend a colored school,"--Mississippi.

"Any person . . . who shall rent any part of any such building to a negro person or a negro family when such building is already in whole or in part in occupancy by a white person or white family shall be guilty of a misdemeanor,"--Louisiana.

As blacks emerged from slavery after the Civil War, Southern states adapted a new strategy to prevent them from improving their status or achieving equality. They passed laws on marriage, schools, housing, and conduct intended to keep the races apart. The laws and customs of segregation that followed the Civil War became known as Jim Crow, named after a minstrel character from the 1830s.

A new documentary tells what it was like to live during the Jim Crow era, which lasted from the 1880s through 1954, when the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of public schools. The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow, a four-part series for PBS from Thirteen/ WNET New York, lets viewers learn about the era through the stories of its victims, perpetrators, and opponents.

The threat of physical pain, public humiliation, and death held Jim Crow laws firmly in place. Blacks and whites who tried to protest Jim Crow laws risked their lives. In 1919, ninety lynchings occurred in a single year--one every four days. Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative explains in the film: "You could not keep African Americans in this country in a subordinate status without the threat of violence." Historian Patricia Sullivan echoes Stevenson: "Relief from physical terrorism was critical to all of the other rights that people would strive for."

Yet people did fight against the system. Ned Cobb was a successful black sharecropper in Alabama who bought his own farm and formed a tenant farmers union. In the early twentieth century, a sharecropper's life was a cycle of misery. Because the banks based their loans on the value of the crops not the land, tenant farmers had to grow cash crops, like cotton instead of food for their families. Banks and merchants took their money straight from the sale of the cotton so that farmers had to go back and borrow more for food. Six thousand of Cobb's fellow sharecroppers joined him in forming the Alabama Sharecropper's Union. Cobb's descendants tell his story in the documentary, including one incident in the 1930s, when Cobb went to prevent his neighbor's land from being repossessed. During the confrontation, he exchanged gunshots with the sheriff and was sent to prison for thirteen years.

"The horrific you expect--the heroic you don't," says Richard Wormser, producer, writer, and director of the documentary. Wormser spent the last seven years collecting the stories. Wormser says he and Bill Jersey, co-writer, producer, and director, "decided to tell stories about the individuals struggling to subvert and overcome Jim Crow."

An important moment in the struggle against segregation took place in 1909 when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was formed by W.E.B. DuBois, Ida Wells- Barnett, Henry Moscowitz, Mary White Ovington, Oswald Garrison Villiard, and William English Walling. The NAACP broke away from earlier black leaders such as Booker T. Washington, who believed in a gradual accumulation of equality through education and moral fortitude. The NAACP wanted more immediate action and fought for equality through the courts and political advocacy. It provided a forum for a growing black intellectual class in its magazine The Crisis, edited by DuBois. The NAACP made the fight against lynching a top priority.

One hero of the struggle was DuBois's colleague, Walter White, a leader of the NAACP who went south to investigate a rash of lynchings and barely escaped with his own life. White, whose fair complexion and blue eyes belied his African American heritage, was able to move freely through white circles to gather evidence to incriminate those committing violence against blacks. In the time he was there, White investigated forty-one lynchings, eight race riots, and numerous cross-burnings.

When White caught wind that his identity was no longer a secret, he boarded the first train north. The train conductor told him that he was "leaving just before the fun was about to start. . . . There's a damn yellow nigger down here passing for white, and the boys are going to get him. And when they get through with him, he won't pass for white no more." White said later, "No matter what the distance, I shall never take a train ride as long as that one." Although there was never a federal antilynching law passed, work by the NAACP did change public opinion and when White died in 1955 there were only three lynchings that year.

The series also presents the perspective of the enforcers of segregation, the Ku Klux Klan. A long-time Klan member named Gordon Parks recounts attending his first lynching when he was just nine years old. As he tells it, a black man had raped a seventeen-yea-old daughter of a family in the neighborhood. "When her parents come home, she told them, and they called my grandpa. He was the Wizard and my daddy was the Grand Dragon, and they got about a hundred people and we went and got him, and grandpa said I could go with them. . . . We took him down to this thick, old oak tree, and there was about two hundred down there. And they took him and set him down and had his hands tied behind him. And Grandpa asked me--told my daddy to ask me--to ask anybody if they had anything to say before we'd put him up in the tree to hang him. And I asked anybody if they had anything to say and one man said, 'Yeah, I have something to say. . .' and he cut him from ear to ear, and then they put the rope around his neck and pulled him up in the tree. We stayed there about a hour ... to make sure he died before they left."

The Klan inspired fear on both sides of the color line. Another eyewitness to a Klan execution describes how as a young white child in the south following World War II, he hid in the grass and saw the killing of his black neighborhood friend--just returned from the war--his friend's brother and both of their pregnant wives. Later when the sheriff came to his house and asked if anyone knew anything about it, he piped up and said "I know who done it." The sheriff pulled him aside and told him: "I can put some of these people in jail but I can't put all of them in. If they found out you know what you know, it would come back on you, your mama, your sister and your brother. The best thing you could ever do is not to mention this again." He kept the secret for decades, and no one was ever charged with the murders.

Wormser describes the documentary as a story with four, distinct chapters. "Promises Betrayed," part one of the series, covers the period from 1865 to 1896, a time that began with the promise of great freedom yet ended in diminished hope. By the time President Hayes withdrew federal troops from the South in 1877--the official end of Reconstruction--Southern states had already begun to pass laws that segregated and disenfranchised African Americans.

The black middle class emerges as a political and economic force in episode two, "Fighting Back," a look at the period from 1896 to 1917. Episode three, "Don't Shout Too Soon," deals with the violent time between World Wars I and II, from 1918 to 1940. "Terror and Triumph" is the title of the last episode that covers the years from 1940 through 1954, including World War II, which acted as a catalyst for change at home. In World War II, more than two hundred thousand black Americans served their country in the military. And yet, black veterans returning home south of the Mason-Dixon line were spat upon and continually designated to subordinate citizenship. The soldiers returned home ready to demand equal treatment. One of them was Hosea Williams, who became chief lieutenant in Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In the film, Williams describes what many of the soldiers thought: "If we've got to fight and die for America, why should we be treated like slaves?"

Williams, platoon sergeant of the Third Army, shares the violent homecoming he encountered in Thomasville, Georgia, when he asked a woman behind a snack bar at a bus station for a drink of water. She wouldn't give him one, so "I tried to lean inside and get me a cup of water," Williams explains, "and those white people beat me 'till I was unconscious. I was in the army uniform and had all these medals . . . and they beat me until they thought I was dead." Someone called a black undertaker who realized Williams was still alive. The undertaker rushed him to a hospital. "And I laid there crying for eight weeks," Williams continues, "wishing that Adolph Hitler had won the war."

President Harry S. Truman was instrumental in the dismantling of Jim Crow that followed the war. He signed a presidential order to desegregate the military, although he knew there would be a political cost to him in the 1948 election. Despite this handicap, he triumphed over breakaway Dixiecrats in four Southern states to win. He was the first president ever to address the NAACP. But it would be in the courts that the battle over segregation would be decided.

Charles Hamilton Huston, vice dean of Howard Law School, had a plan. He believed that training black lawyers and sending them south to work was the first step in abolishing segregation. "Experience has proved that the average white lawyer, especially in the South, cannot be relied upon to wage an uncompromising fight for equal rights for negroes," Huston declared.

As special counsel to NAACP in 1935, Huston began a legal campaign to end segregation in public schools. His strategy included documenting the inequity between educational opportunities for blacks and whites and reinforcing the expensive price tag associated with separate and equal schools. He believed a broken "separate but equal" policy would eventually eliminate discrimination.

The strategy, of course, relied on individuals who had the conviction to stay the course. One of those individuals was high school student Barbara Johns of Farmville, Virginia. Johns organized a student strike against Moton High School in this quiet, Virginia town that prided itself on the cordiality of its race relations, while still adhering to the Jim Crow era's segregated schools policy. She was outraged that more than 450 black students were crammed into a small, overflowing eight-room schoolhouse made from tar paper covered buildings, while their white counterparts enjoyed a modern facility with room to spare.

"We have a right to have a school as good as the white kids' school," Johns affirmed to fellow Moton High classmates. "We have to make a change, and I mean right now!" And so began a yearlong strike that would help change the nation.

Johns's stance was not without consequences. The parents of many of the students lost their jobs with county departments, and many of the area's teachers were out of work because of a lack of students. Some parents sent their children away to relatives because they worried for their safety.

Johns's suit, eventually bundled with four similar cases from elsewhere in the country, became part of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education. In that case, the Court held that racially segregated public schools are inherently unequal and, therefore, unconstitutional. Chief Justice Earl Warren and a unanimous Supreme Court finally declared, "In the field of public education, the doctrine of separate but equal has no place." Armed with this ammunition from the national courts, the Civil Rights movement would fight discrimination across all aspects of society for the next several decades.

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"All marriages between a white person and a negro, or between a white person and a person of negro descent to the fourth generation inclusive, are hereby forever prohibited,"--Florida. "Separate free schools shall be established for the education of children of African descent; and it shall be unlawful for any colored child to attend any white school, or any white child to attend a colored school,"--Mississippi.

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A guidebook for African-American travelers during segregation.

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For decades, The Green Book was the black traveler's lifeline

smithsonian.com

For most travelers, a road trip is as easy as packing up luggage, hopping in the car and heading out into the great unknown. But for black Americans, things were never that simple. A series of groundbreaking travel guides from the Jim Crow era have been recently digitized, Gustavo Solis reports for shedding light on the sobering dangers of segregated travel.
The Green Book had to speak in code:
Invented by a postal service worker named Victor Hugo Green, The Green Book was published between 1936 and 1966 as a crucial resource for black travelers. Each guide vetted lists of businesses that would safely serve black travelers-a lifeline in an era of segregated hotels, businesses and "sundown towns" that banned black people. And this year, Solis writes, almost every Green Book has been digitized by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library.
As modes of transportation improved, so did opportunities for black workers:
In an extensive background on the guides, CityLab's Tanvi Misra calls them a creative way for black travelers to "sidestep humiliation (or worse) on their journeys." At times charming and matter-of-fact, and other times chilling, the guides offered insight on everything from changing modes of transportation to the fears and anxieties that black travelers carried during the Jim Crow era. Here are a few important details from the Schomburg Center's collection.
To spot discrimination, just read between the lines:
This excerpt from a 1956 guide hints at the obstacles and dangers that black travelers faced across America. The "embarrassing situations" are clearly a reference to the violence and discrimination inflicted by bigots.
The Green Book contained hope... ...and humor: But nonetheless, the guide provided a crucial service:
This excerpt from a 1938 guide shows the promise represented by the automobile-both for black people who wanted to travel and those who sought a means of upward mobility. Later editions of The Green Book also showcased rail, boat and plane travel.
Most of all, The Green Book defended black Americans and their civil rights:
A typical listing from this 1956 guide lists the types of businesses that welcomed black patrons-and the dearth of beauty parlors, restaurants, drug stores and tailors illustrates how often businessowners refused to serve black customers.

This 1939 advertisement highlights the "fear and uncertainty" that must have accompanied travel, even in (relatively) progressive cities such as New York.

In the 1963-64 edition, readers could refer to a two-page listing of travelers' rights. The guide's focus on civil rights was prescient: within months, the Civil Rights Act forbade the types of discrimination that had inspired The Green Book. In 1966, the last edition of the guide was published.

Though civil rights have been enshrined in law and the Green Book hasn't been printed for decades, discrimination and segregation are still serious, unsolved issues. Just last month, a high-profile lawsuit alleged discriminatory policies in a Houston nightclub. The struggle to make all public places equal for all races continues to this day.

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About Erin Blakemore

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A Black American's Guide to Travel In the Jim Crow Era

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smithsonian.com For most travelers, a road trip is as easy as packing up luggage, hopping in the car and heading out into the great unknown. But for black Americans, things were never that simple. A series of groundbreaking travel guides from the Jim Crow era have been recently digitized, Gustavo Solis reports for shedding light on the sobering dangers of segregated travel.