“If Finch were a civil-rights hero, he would be brimming with rage at the unjust verdict. But he isn’t. He’s not Thurgood Marshall looking for racial salvation through the law. He’s Jim Folsom, looking for racial salvation through hearts and minds.”
Malcolm Gladwell writes a lengthy New Yorker essay about To Kill a Mockingbird‘s Atticus Finch, Alabama Governer “Big Jim” Folsom, race, and “the limits of Southern liberalism.”