What To Kill a Mockingbird Means to Me by Morris Dees

[Swede]

snip

As the son of an Alabama cotton farmer, I grew up 100 miles from Ms. Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, so it was easy for me to identify with life in the fictional town of Maycomb. The Tom Robinson incident in the book was representative of the type of “justice” African Americans could expect at the time. I became aware of this truth when I was still a teenager.

I remember the morning my father told me that Clarence Williams, a black man who drove a tractor on our farm, had been arrested for driving drunk. Over breakfast, he asked me to try to get Clarence out of trouble. When I asked Clarence what happened, he told me he had struck a concrete median after his car had a mechanical problem. He was dizzy from the collision when a state trooper stopped and pulled him out of the car. The trooper accused him of being drunk, hit him with a blackjack and took him to jail.

I thought all I needed to do was explain to the judge what happened. I’d always figured that if you told the truth, you’d receive justice. Clarence and I met with the judge – a justice of the peace who held court in his country store from behind the cash register – and we told him what happened. Without hesitation, the judged declared Clarence guilty and fined him $150, not a small sum considering Clarence was earning $5 a day.

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/news/what-to-kill-a-mockingbird-means-to-me

[ananda]

1. Huge rec!

nt

[Joe Chi Minh]

2. K&R

[elleng]

3. The author, Morris Dees, founded the Southern Poverty Law Center. HUGE!

[Better Today]

4. I'm a little confused how Mr. Dees can justify his outrage at

the treatment of Clarence Williams if his family was responsible for his low pay of only $5 a day. Sorry, but that's a huge disconnect for me.

[CTyankee]

5. I was a beneficiary of a system that did this. I grew up in Texas where I attended

segregated schools and rode on segregated buses, etc. My father was a businessman in Dallas and probably did pay blacks who worked for him less than whites. While my parents weren't raging racists, they acceded to the racist norms of their times.

I left Texas when I went to college, never to return again to live. It left a bad taste in the mouths of my family, albeit not seriously.

The best thing I could do was to leave and go where I could live in peace with myself, and that was north. I went to school in the Northeast and settled there.

Please, I think Morris Dees has more than "paid his dues." He is a lifelong liberal and devotes his time and his money to liberal causes. He can't change the family situation he was born into. What more can you ask of him?

[gateley]

7. Really? What's so confusing. He was a teenager at the time, he's now

in his 70's. Minimum wage was about .40/hr, making an 8 hour day's pay $3.28. Are you judging this man who has devoted he life to helping people in need by some standard you've set in your mind? What do you think he should have been paid?

[hedgehog]

6. The question is how much was Mr. Dee's father making.

If he'd been that rich, no doubt the Justice of the Peace would have declared Mr. Williams innocent. Don't forget, were talking about Alabama in what, 1955?


Hired hands still make squat. I don't know about large farms, but the small farmers work hard and alongside their employees to make a middle class living.

[midnight]

8. Sadly, this racket is going on big time.