SOURCE: Crespino, Joseph. “The Strange Career of Atticus Finch.” Southern Cultures 6, no. 2 (summer 2000): 9-29.

In the following essay, Crespino examines popular and critical responses to the representation of race and justice in To Kill a Mockingbird between the years 1960 and 2000.

Contemporary debates concerning race in America owe much to the 1960s when African Americans and other minority groups gained basic legal protections and rights of citizenship denied them in the century following Reconstruction. The current offspring of this movement is multiculturalism, a term that encompasses a range of progressive educational techniques, policy recommendations, and social movements that celebrate racial and ethnic differences and seek to empower people to pursue goals of personal and communal freedom. One of the basic questions raised in the 1960s that reverberates in multiculturalism today is who in our society is allowed to speak authoritatively on racial issues. Over the course of the twentieth...