This. And I was just a little kid when it came out but by the time I read it in high school it was already just Sixties Deep and I was already sick of Downtrodden Minorities saved by Heroic White men, a trope that has continued to this day.
But he was raising her in 1930 - in Alabama. She needed the skills her aunt gave her - those are survival skills in Alabama for a woman well into the 1970s (and maybe even today). His is either extraordinarily visionary, or a bad father. I adore Atticus, but he really is an example of managing to raise kids through benign neglect. Fortunately, he had good kids.
But the Heroic White Man doesn’t save the Downtrodden Minority. He is convicted. He goes to prison. He attempts to escape and is shot down as he tries to make it to the wall. Atticus failed.
Except that he doesn’t. He made the town think, maybe for the first time, what it means to be human. It’s more than decades of ill-treatment, a habit, really. Remember when Atticus’ brother comes to town and they comment on certain townspeople? He’s a generation off, Atticus says, but he’s generally on the mark. He makes them realize, uncomfortably, that a black man is a man, something that hadn’t really occurred to them before. We’re shown how Calpurnia’s friends and relatives live and go to church; it hadn’t really occurred to the children that she had a life outside their kitchen. Forgivable in children, not so much in adults. See the parallel?
It’s a wonderful book; I don’t think anyone’s arguing it’s the be-all and end-all of all literature. It does what it sets out to do very well: presents a common problem that nobody really considered a problem, and released it when some people were indeed waking up to that fact. It’s important for that reason, and for the fact that it’s a good story well-told.
I came back to post something like this; thanks for doing it first, and so well.
Non-American here, for all practical purposes. I grew up in very racially mixed settings, but the roles that race and racism played were very different from what they would have been for a kid in the US.
Probably because of this, when I read To Kill a Mockingbird (in my mid-teens) I didn’t see it as a book about racism or racial tension. I didn’t miss that storyline or anything; it just wasn’t the core of the book for me. I saw it as a book about the insane things that people will do, the mental contortions they’ll force themselves through and the degree to which they’ll divorce themselves from reality, in order to hold onto their preconceptions; and a book about what it means, and what it takes, to maintain your integrity in the face of immense and complicated pressure; and a book about how part of growing up is realising the complexity of human nature, coming to terms with the fact that what’s blindingly obvious and simple to a kid may not be so simple from an adult perspective, and that every person you see has a life as intricate and intense as your own.
I loved it, obviously. Still do.
I read it in fourth grade for a school book competition - it was the book that awarded the most points. I felt like I understood it as I was reading it, but I only barely passed the comprehension test. I knew a little bit about racism, but it definitely made that reality come alive for me. There are things in that book that are really shocking and hard to comprehend for a child. OTOH, a lot of it was frankly over my head. I’m curious how I’d feel about it if I read it today.
OTOH, I was shattered by Uncle Tom’s Cabin when I read that several years later. It is the only book in the history of my reading where the death of a character has upset me enough to stop reading for weeks.
[QUOTE=Sam A Robrin]
I’ll admit, I get annoyed that people are still writing, and others are still reading, books (movies, songs, graffiti, what-have-you) that allow them to congratulate themselves for agreeing with the point that racism is bad.
[/QUOTE]
As long as there are people who don’t agree that racism is bad, there is a need for books and movies that talk about how racism is bad. I’ll give you that TKaM was more groundbreaking than a lot of the stuff out there today, but it’s a conversation we still need to have, because even if the circumstances of racism and the ways it impacts our culture have changed, it’s still here and that dialog still needs to happen.
Nothing like a Straight Dope post to bring out the haters 
Next let’s tackle that conniving cunt Mother Teresa.