Well, there’s John C. Anderson, the chief justice of the Albama SC, the lone voice of dissent against upholding the guilty verdict on the basis of an unfair trial and poor legal counsel.
(Bolding mine).
Did it? I didn’t know. I have never seen the movie, and, while I can understand that they are different things, I admit to being one of those who grumble about what the film version omits or changes from the book. Probably I ought at least to re-read the book and see whether I can find bits of the film version online. it seems quite an important change for the movie to make. Hmm.
Whenever you adapt any novel into a movie, you’re going to have to cut a lot. And when you adapt a good novel, you’re going to have to cut something good. What would you have had them cut, rather than what they did?
Calpurnia isn’t even at the trial in the Movie. While I guess the book could be viewed as a version of the “Magical Negro” trope, there is no reason in the movie for me to view the change from being a tyrant to a mother figure without that view into her double life.
In the movie Tom is also not fleeing the mob when he is shot by the guards which annoyed me too.
I read To Kill a Mockingbird when it was first published back when I was in high school. I tend to agree with the OP though I do like the story of the kind and intelligent father and the precocious siblings. OTOH I have long rejected what I see is the mythology behind the main theme of the book: A noble lawyer defends a black man in the face of the fierce racial hatred from the uneducated masses. He receives assistance from some of the town’s better citizens – the judge, the sheriff, some middle class neighbors. Nice story, but IMO not historically accurate.
Everyone is familiar with the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan. The conventional wisdom for many years suggested that even though the organization was started by Nathan Forrest and other Confederate officers, it was quickly abandoned by the elites and was taken over by the less educated.
That apologia for the Southern patricians has been proven false, but beyond that what is overlooked in this whitewashed version of history is the role of the White Citizens Councils throughout the South. These organizations most often included the leading citizens of their communities. While the Klan might have done the dirty work, it was the WCC that often set the agenda.
Thus in the fictional town represented in To Kill a Mockingbird, the leading citizens would not have been working to give an innocent black man a fair trial. The folks from old Sarum who threatened to lynch Tom Robinson would most likely have been incited by racist rhetoric from their betters. Southern elites didn’t oppose lynching. Southern congressmen in fact filibustered against anti-lynching laws. And though there were courageous individuals such as Atticus Finch, they did not receive adulation or support from their communities. At best they were tolerated. At worst they and their families were threatened and attacked.
In the United States racial and ethnic hatred has long been used by the ruling elites to divide the working classes and keep them in their place. This occurred during Reconstruction, the labor union movement, the populist movement, the sharecroppers union of the 30s, and the civil rights movement; and it is still occurring today.
Didn’t he get shot while trying to escape a chain gang in the book? Don’t have the book in front of me.
This is one of the better threads I’ve seen on the SDMB, and it all started with a rant about literature. Cool. 
What makes propaganda is a point of view. One does not have to agree with Joad’s politics to recognize the world portrayed around him was real. The same with Gatsby. The individual characters were fiction but still plausible, but they inhabit a completely plausible world. The South of To Kill a Mockingbird is far less plausible, bordering on imaginary. Like I said in the first place:
Not hardly. Now wiggle back to your marsh! 
The world of the Joads was a cartoonish exaggeration. It takes real events and twists them to serve the agenda of the writer.
For example in the book the Joads are lured to California by handbills printed by farmers in order to keep wages low. In actuality Okies moved to California because farm laborers made twice as much on average as the did in Oklahoma and even though farmers preferred mexican workers they hired the Okies because of a shortage of labor.
In the book the young girl gives birth to a still born child in a government camp because of malnutrition. In reality every camp had a full time nurse, access to state provided food, and every child was born in the local hospital.
In the book local police repeatedly burn down the Hooverville the family lives in because they don’t like the migrants. In reality migrants were first moved to cities and Hoovervilles were burned to keep infectious diseases from spreading.
In the book there is a flood and the Joads find an old barn on high ground where a man and his son are starving to death. In reality when there was a flood the government and locals moved all of the migrant workers to a town where they were housed in the local schools. All of the migrants were offered free tickets back to their home states and no one took the offer.
The whole point of the Great Gatsby is that it is not real. Gatsby is a poor farmer’s son turned war hero turned incredibly rich bootlegger. Nick introduces himself as an honest person who doesn’t judge anyone. In reality Nick is seduced by Gatsby’s wealth and charm. He judges harshly everyone except Gatsby who he always defends despite the fact that he is part of a vicious criminal enterprise and is wasting his money trying to seduce another man’s wife. Nick comes to believe that Gatsby was killed because he believed in America, but actually Nick was the mark all along.
These are not contradictory facts. There is absolutely no reason that Okies could be moving to make twice as much in Calif. AND the farmers in the latter also wanted to keep wages from rising, or lower them. In fact, the motivation of the Californians to get more labor is even more clear when you realize how much they were already paying for it. They had every incentive to keep wages from rising further! The way labor was treated during the Depression is a major source of the body of labor law that we have now.
Again, there is nothing to prevent all the above from being true. Even today, there are vast refugee camps all over the world with nurses and food, and people still dying in them. This happens because there’s enough nurses and food for, say 1,000 people, but there are 10,000 people in the camp. And in fact it’s well known that government services during the Depression were not always very generous or consistent by modern standards, especially early on and in remote areas.
Or, perhaps the police burned down the Hoovervilles, then after the fact claimed all the inhabitants were taken out prior and they then burned it to prevent the spread of disease. No reason that couldn’t be true, or both stories be true at different times.
The book is not describing an event that has any unique or specific counterparts to historical events, so this point is a non sequitur. Not all floods had similar outcomes.
What is contradictory is that California was paying the second highest wages in the country for agricultural workers because there is a shortage of workers and the book is about a family of those workers who are starving to death because there is no work. This is not an isolated phenomenon and others are depicted in similar straits. Yet you find the idea that there might have been a decent person in a southern town more realistic than that obvious propaganda.
He was shot 17 times in part because without the use of his arm he couldn’t climb the fence in the exercise yard.
I must have mixed my books in my head as I thought we was running from a exercise yard mob but it appears I was mistaken.
Still an innocent man in prison for a capitol offense.
While white Okies were described as being as sub-human as the slaves The Grapes of Wrath doesn’t even address African American suffering. I don’t think it addresses racial tensions except using them as plot lines.
It seems to ignore that both black and white people were migrating.
Sure it targets poverty and powerlessness, but I don’t think it is a good example of a better book in this case.
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is the one from that era that I know of that I would probably say is the most honest (from an extremely ignorant standpoint of a white male who wouldn’t have been exposed to most books)
But can you explain what I am missing here in my interpretation of the books?
and get slammed by white classmates as “racist”?
because she caters to her white audience
if you’re white, of course they wouldn’t tell you; and what does required reading have to do with Blacks disliking book?
I think he’s implying that a high school named after Booker T. Washington would probably have a pretty race-conscious reading list. Then again, To Kill a Mockingbird. is exactly what they’d read at Booker T. High. At W.E.B. DuBois High School they’re reading The Fire Next Time.
Why not? I had black friends. One of them told me he thought LotR was boring as all hell, and another argued (as was said here) that The Grapes of Wrath “Okies” may have had it tough, but not as tough as the Black man did.
In Upper Div American Lit (where of course we didnt do LotR) it was a open round table discussion, and people spoke their minds.
Here’s another
