To kill 'To Kill a Mockingbird'

Liberals have devoted endless attention to what they see as a fervor for "book banning" among conservatives. In most cases, the "bans" are complaints registered by individuals who think a given book is inappropriate for children — usually because it contains explicit sexual content — and who want it removed from the shelves of a local library or school. According to the American Library Association, there were 2,571 such challenges to books in American libraries last year. The ALA decries the "attempted book bans" and blames them on "organized censorship" campaigns by conservative groups.

Objecting to a book, of course, isn't censorship. And even if a librarian accedes to a demand that a book be pulled from its collection, what of it? All it means is that potential readers might have to make an extra effort to lay their hands on it — by going to a different library, perhaps, or buying it from a book dealer, or reading it online. In 21-st century America, books can't be banned — not even in Boston, where city officials used to specialize in criminalizing books, plays, movies, and songs they deemed offensive.

"There are no banned books in Cuba," Fidel Castro once declared, "only those which we have no money to buy." But in Cuba, books really are banned: Just try to locate one that criticizes Castro. Cuban bookstores and public libraries carry plenty of volumes exalting Marxism, but you won't find "The Gulag Archipelago" or "Nineteen Eighty-Four" on their shelves, let alone "Against All Hope," Armando Valladares's brave memoir of life under the Cuban dictatorship.

That's book banning.

Here, meanwhile, liberals also attack books they disapprove of, from assorted Dr. Seuss titles to "Huckleberry Finn" to the Bible. Frequently on the progressive chopping block is one of the most beloved and uplifting books in modern American literature, Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1960 novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird." In recent years, the book has been pulled from classrooms in a number of communities, including Biloxi, Miss.; Burbank, Calif.; and Duluth, Minn. Like many liberal news outlets, The Washington Post has generally poured scorn on conservatives who challenge books.

But in a lengthy article last week, it reported with sympathy on a successful campaign by four progressive teachers to remove "To Kill a Mockingbird" from freshman classes in the Mukilteo school district near Seattle.

The Post quotes with evident approval the teachers' accusation that the book "centers on whiteness" and "presents a barrier to understanding and celebrating an authentic Black point of view in Civil Rights era literature." It portrays the teachers in a heroic light as they insist that it is "painfully obvious that this novel . . . does not belong in our curriculum." It mentions that "opponents of the book have argued its 48 mentions of the N-word are harmful to students, especially students of color."

To be sure, the story makes clear that other educators disagreed strongly with the foursome's crusade against "Mockingbird." But its admiration for the activist teachers is barely disguised and the Post cites the "thrill of pride" felt by one of the teachers over the knowledge that ninth-graders would no longer be assigned Lee's classic. (The school committee did allow the book to remain an option in other grades.)

I first encountered "To Kill a Mockingbird" in eighth grade. It was one of the first truly great reading experiences of my life. Lee's book recounts the story of Atticus Finch, a white lawyer in Depression-era Macomb, Ala., who defends Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. The evidence makes it clear that the defendant is innocent, but the white jury, steeped in racism, finds him guilty as charged. Later, when Tom in desperation tries to escape from prison, guards shoot him dead.

If Lee's book justified Tom Robinson's conviction or embraced the jury's bigotry, the argument that it "presents a barrier to understanding" the cruelty of racism and segregation would be on point. But "Mockingbird" does exactly the opposite. It humanizes those who are victimized by the ignorance and fear of others. It provides an unforgettable portrait of courage in the face of popular bigotry. It teaches lessons in social complexity, tolerance, the indispensability of empathy, and the contemptibility of racial bigotry. In one of many memorable passages, Atticus tries to help his young son make sense of the unjust verdict.

"If you had been on that jury, son, and eleven other boys like you, Tom would be a free man," Atticus tells him.

"So far nothing in your life has interfered with your reasoning process. Those are twelve reasonable men in everyday life, Tom's jury, but you saw something come between them and reason. . . . There's something in our world that makes men lose their heads — they couldn't be fair if they tried. In our courts, when it's a white man's word against a black man's, the white man always wins. They're ugly, but those are the facts of life."

"Doesn't make it right," said Jem stolidly. He beat his fist softly on his knee. "You just can't convict a man on evidence like that — you can't."

"You couldn't, but they could and did. The older you grow, the more of it you'll see. The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a courtroom, be he any color of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box. As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it — whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash."

"To Kill a Mockingbird" teaches, with deep sensitivity and compassion, that Black lives matter. Novels like "To Kill a Mockingbird" enlarge the heart and inspire the mind. They have the power to uplift readers and enrich them — no matter where those readers live or how they worship or the color of their skin. Study "Mockingbird" as a youngster and you acquire a moral instrument with which to strengthen your own humanity and perceive the humanity in others. In an era when racism still consumed American society, Harper Lee turned the ancient biblical injunction against oppressing a stranger into a powerful and enduring piece of literature, one particularly accessible to teens. To strip her great novel from high school curricula on the grounds that it is insufficiently sensitive to racial injustice or Black dignity is worse than misguided, it's a sin.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission."