'Mockingbird' Still Teaching Lessons
To Kill a Mockingbird still resonates for many, including President Bush, who awarded author Harper Lee the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Monday.
Lee rarely makes public appearances, but she appeared to accept the medal, the Cox News Service reports. Bush introduced her by saying the book “has influenced the character of our country for the better.”
The book about Atticus Finch and his defense of an unpopular client—a black man accused of raping a white woman—is a favorite of many lawyers. Law professor Thomas Baker of Florida International University told the ABA Journal that Atticus Finch inspired him to become lawyer.
Today in the Wall Street Journal (sub.req.), columnist Daniel Henninger sees parallels between Lee’s fictional defendant and Justice Clarence Thomas, who complained that charges of sexual harassment during his confirmation hearings were akin to a “high-tech lynching.”
“What Mr. Thomas absorbed from his grandfather, in an often harsh and brutal manner, is precisely what Harper Lee said is at the core of To Kill a Mockingbird: a code of honor and conduct,” Henninger wrote. “Atticus Finch, I think, would have objected to what was done to Clarence Thomas in that Senate confirmation hearing.”
