My Father and Atticus Finch: A Lawyer's Fight for Justice in 1930s Alabama

A memoir about the author’s father, whose courageous defense of a black man accused of rape calls to mind To Kill a Mockingbird.As a child, Joe Beck heard about his father’s legacy: Foster Beck had once been a respected trial lawyer who defied the unspoken code of 1930s Alabama by defending a black man charged with raping a white woman. Now a lawyer himself, Beck has become intrigued by the similarities between his father’s story and the one at the heart of Harper Lee’s iconic novel.Beck reconstructs here his father’s role in the 1938 trial—much publicized when Harper Lee was twelve years old—in which the examining doctor testified before a packed and hostile courtroom that there was no evidence of intercourse or violence. Nevertheless, the all-white jury voted to convict. This riveting memoir seeks to understand how race, class, and the memory of the South’s defeat in the Civil War produced the trial’s outcome, and how these issues figure into our literary imagination.