The Impact of To Kill a Mockingbird

At the age of twelve, I stole To Kill a Mockingbird from my sister’s backpack and sneaked away to my room to read. It was one of those things that children do as a protest against their parents for saying that a rated R movie or an album marked “Parental Advisory” or a book with the N word is too salacious for us to watch or read. My parents had banned Mockingbird from me under the trumped up (though probably true) charge of lacking maturity.

I read the book in one night, starting from the innocuous enough “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow” weaving my way through a coming of age tale intertwined with a loving story of a father and his daughter, all the while peppering in, in greater and greater amounts, the harrowing tale of racial injustice that the fictitious town of Maycomb, Alabama was undergoing. As a twelve-year-old boy in a town nearly 96% white, I had never heard of racial injustice presented in such a humanistic way. The capital-c, capital-r Civil Rights Movement was an abstraction to me almost 55 years after it happened. But this was different, it was what showed me the real, tangible, human impact of racial injustice. Bear in mind that much of this analysis obviously is after the fact and after three more readings of the novel. A more accurate read into twelve-year-old Connor’s brain, already preoccupied with baseball and that one girl in my social studies class with whom I was desperately infatuated, was along the lines of, “wow that’s not nice.”

However juvenile I was at the time, it lit a spark. Going into middle school, I became fascinated with modern political history. I read everything I could get my hands on about the Civil War, Jim Crow, the Gilded Age, all the way through the Civil Rights Movement. But, for as voracious as my yearning for knowledge was, I didn’t realize that some of the very same things that were happening during the Civil Rights Movement (voter suppression, police brutality, etc) were all still happening.

When you read TKaM when you are young, you relate to Scout. She’s young, smart, righteous. She’s everything you want to be as a young kid. As you get older, you begin to deal with more contradictions. You’re trying to get into colleges but you don’t want to give up that bit of youth you have left, you’re trying to learn as much as you can and still have time to have a social life, you’re trying to decide for yourself your own moral compass and your own right and wrong. Here, you relate to Atticus.

Atticus teaches you that no, it is not right that African American children, on average, get a worse education than white children. No, it is not right that Black youths are targeted by police. No, it is not right that Black men and women are given higher interest rates. Atticus taught me to be firm and unmoving when it came to these points. He teaches that nothing can change unless you make sure that it changes. It is because of Atticus that I want to be a lawyer and defend those who can’t defend themselves.

I credit To Kill a Mockingbird with shaping what I want to do with my life. It came to me as a twelve-year-old and set the stage for my passions and my interests and showed me True North on my moral compass. Its lesson has stayed with me for nearly eight years and will return to me for the rest of my life, whenever it is needed.