re: To Kill a Mockingbird

quote:

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What a ridiculous claim: "book was never supposed to be about civil rights".

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And while I accept that it was not overtly a "civil rights text" - the subtext of it is omnipresent in the novel. Ultimately it is about a longforgotten aspect of this - the necessity of white involvement for there to be any change at all. When white opinion (North, South, East and West) was consensus that blacks were inferior, it took a few dissenting white folks to generate any sort of movement in the right direction.

When one looks at how carefully the public image of Joe Louis, for example, was protected (his private life was a shambles, multiple women, terrible business decisions, just bad with money), to the selection of Jackie Robinson - a black player who was most acceptable to white baseball fans at the time (I'm a huge fan of Jackie Robinson, but it was not widely publicized, at least at the time he was historically called up from the minors, that he had led a civil rights protest, himself, while in uniform in the U.S. Army, shortly before Truman integrated the U.S. military).

But it was those few influential white folks (like the fictional Atticus Finch) that started to turn the tide in the 30s, 40s, 50s, in cooperation with black civil rights leaders.