to our as conservationists, we are only working for ourselves, not the future and certainly not for future generations of all species. >> watch this and other programs online booktv.org. >> i think we're good. >> good evening and welcome to area, we're so excited to have joe back for his new book on suspension and harper lee's father. he will also be on a panel at the mississippi book festival august 18 so i hope you will be able to attend, we are excited already and we're lining up some great authors for it. before we get started everyone else is your cell phones and also, i would like to say, a few things here we are excited about that we got

a report with all the questions so if you have a question, raise your hand and wait for the microphone to come to you. let's give bill a round of applause. [applause] >> thank you all so much for being here and for amelia for having me back my third time. and for many of you it's your third time you come here and get a book talk. i seemany familiar faces here . i appreciate you coming out and braving the on this summer afternoon and look forward to visiting with you all. some of you i've already spoken with particularly my mother-in-law and father-in-law jim and beverly harry for the wine and beer in the back and turning this event into a book party, thank you very much and everybody make sure you get some refreshments at some

point. >> this is on book or me to talk about. this is a book that is based on a book that plays a huge role in our political culture and in popular culture. it's a i have read and many times about for a long time. i will say that i do not have a story about the first time i read to kill a mockingbird and how my life mike was transformed by it. i'm sure i read in middle school or early high school but i can't tell you when you i do love it because i grew up in the small town a lot like megan alabama. and roseville where harper lee herself through a but i came back to this book in graduate school when i was, other books and works of political history that are examining this.

from roughly the 1930s into the 1980s and 90s and through the 20th century, these dramatic changes where the self goes from being a segregated society uad segregated society that's what my work has been about, about the politics and history of back but as i was doing this work and studying to do this work in graduate school, my brother was two years older than me who have a lot, my brother passed away but he was a fascinating character. he had all these quirky interests. he benson and hedges menthol cigarettes and never missed an episode of days of our lives. like15 years . >> you love linda carlisle of the go-go's would constantly be listening to belinda carlisle years after the go-go's their heyday and he

love to kill a mockingbird. love to kill a mockingbird and would always tell me in graduate school you got to read to kill a mockingbird. it's so important to the kind of things you are talking about and i'd say yeah, yeah. it'skind of a child's book . i'm too sophisticated for that kind of thing that i went back and i did read it again and i watched the movie. robert was right, it is fascinating. it's fascinating as this cultural phenomenon, published in 1960, made into a movie in 1962 and gregory auster for portraying atticus finch and then it stayed on reading lists. my daughter was in eighth grade in her english class likemillions of kids around the united states, around the world .

and why do we assign to kill a mockingbird always in grade or ninth grade? it's because this book has become a kind of primer for young middle school children to think about the history. it's one of the first times they think about the history of racial injustice in the south and in the united states and the figure of atticus finch serves as a touchstone of decency and empathy with our critical values for the multiracial small view democratic society that we all grew up in and live in. so why this book gets assigned so often and why continues to be read and revered and loved and i continue to love to kill a mockingbird and atticus finch but i've always had problems with atticus finch and the mythology of atticus finch.

it always seemed a little too much for me sometimes. so i was always wanting to write about the book but it was hard to do because you have the book itself. you have a handful of things that harper lee had said about the book when it was published in promotions she did for the movie. the last time harper lee spoke on the record to anybody about her fiction was in march 1964. there wasn't much to go on if you're going to write about this novel and this character but that changed in the summer of 2015 because in summer of 2015, this other novel harper lee wrote, go set a watchman was published and in it there's the character of atticus and the big revelation is that atticus finch was not the idealistic father and brave defender of the downtrodden

that he was in "to kill a mockbird". he was pretty much what you would assume, a 70-year-old arthritic white southerner would be in alabama in 1907. he was racist and reactionary, didn't like the changes going on in the south and all the rest so for those of you who haven't read "go set a watchman", what happens in that novel is the adult scout who comes back from new york to her hometown and realizes her beloved father wouldn't hurt a ground squirrel was a kind and decent man is falling in with these small-town racist reactionaries . and what happens over the course of the novel is that gene the lease as a series of these important conversations with the men in her life. suter, henry clinton and ultimately with atticus himself in which he saying

atticus, the south has to change and atticus, she's worked up and emotional about it and atticus is the calm voice of reason in which he explained the kind of principles and segregationist position. and that book when it came out in 2015 everyone focused on the fact that atticus was a racist but we miss the politics of how hard lee would have been writing a book in 1957 when she wrote and one of the important things to remember about "go set a watchman" and this is confusing but "go set a watchman" is set in the 1950s. "to kill a mockbird" in the 1930s but "go set a watchman" was the book she wrote first. it was the book she wrote after she received this gift from her friends in christmas of 1956 that allowed her to quit her job airline reservation is and commit fully writing an extended

piece of fiction.it's the first time she tried to write a novel and "go set a watchman" was the first novel she wrote. thanks to some exclusive sources i've been to have access to, that are actually in the archives of harpercollins, harper lee's longtime publisher, we know now for the first time what is the relationship between those two novels. it's not like early wrote a version of atticus as a racist reactionary figure and read and said i like that, i'm throwing out and i'm going to make it an idealist instead. that's not what she did. she wrote back, her agent was trying to get published various publishing houses and while he was doing that and while it was not selling because it was not selling, two different houses, novel . she starts writing the

childhood of the characters that she was writing about in "go seta watchman" and this is material that's just flowing however writer and this is where she found her voice , when she writes in childhood voice. her agent is loving it and she says keep on with this other stuff, don't worry about this, we're going to sell his childhood novel and they do so. they sell it, she advises them to and a half years and it comes out and becomes this literary phenomenon . so it's important to understand the relationship betweenthose two novels . we know to those archives in the harpercollins class that harper lee always imagined them as to parts of the same story the larger narrative arc. the characters in the 1930s would evolve into the characters of the 1950s. so atticus we see through the

eyes of a nine-year-old scott in "to kill a mockbird" but she's struggling to come to grips with her father in "go set a watchman". >> so when that came out, my response was whatever you think about it as a work of fiction, there are some people who didn't like it and obviously there were flaws because houses were publishing houseswere passing on . and there's not a lot of story to report dramatic action. it's a series of conversations. it is of course her first novel and it's difficult to write novels, i don't know if you tried it but it's very hard so it's not surprising that her first novel wouldn't be successful. but whatever you think about it, as a work of fiction, it is fascinating as a historical document. it's an insight to giving us

insight into what harper lee was concerned about and thinking about and what she was trying to capture in her fiction. when she first sat down to write this book. so that set me on a search in my role as a historian to try to make sense of these two different versions of atticus and what we do as historians is tracked change over time, that the blocking and tackling of historical enterprise and now we have to change over time. atticus darted over this and became, that's what i set out in this book is to explain that in the first place i went was to try and make sense of harper lee's father and the things that she thought about when she thought on the record reporters, she talked about how her father was the

inspiration for the character of atticus. he wasn't exactly but he inspired character. >> i wanted to go back and know more about harper lee's father. we knew very little about. we knew that he was like atticus finch a smalltime lawyer and state legislator in the 1920s and 1930s but what no one has paid attention to was the fact he was also the owner and editor of the munro journal which was the newspaper in monroeville alabama. the only 1929 1947 so i did tend to those newspapers that were available in microfilm in the state archives in montgomery and in the state department, alabama department of archives and history. i grew up in the small town

so i knew there's no guarantee that a small-town newspaper from the 1930s would have an editorial page. the town i grew up in, the macon beacon was the name of the newspaper and that's a great newspaper now, scott boyd has done a great job with when i was growing up in macon, they would run the obituaries on the front page and the newspaper was made up of who visited who at christmas or easter, that kind of thing. that was the kind of small-town paper i grew up with so i'm expecting that in the monroe journal but i get in in 1933. why would i have started in 1933? march 1933? roosevelt is inaugurated, goldstar. roosevelt was thelast person inaugurated in march. they moved it to january after that . we're going to see if lacey

said anything about harper lee. let's pull up the first microfilm real and i discovered i had a goldmine because not only does ac lee have an editorial page but got an active and ambitious editorial page. he's writing every week, two, three, four editorials not just about local matters but about the evolution of the new deal over the course of the 1930s and by the late 1930s he's writing about the suppression of religious rights in germany. he's writing about kristallnacht in 1938, the rise of fascism in japan. this is a man, one of the things i also discovered was that the highest grade he ever completed was eighth grade. he grew up very for in the panhandle of florida, born in georgia but his father was a homesteader, grew up and only attended eight years of

education but he was lincoln asked in his habits of self-education and a voracious reader and he had this newspaper and he took seriously his role as the operator of a free press and a democratic society and wanted to make sure his readers were informed on important topics of the day. he would write in this way, all his 19th-century post he would writing and we get these services and some of his editorials, it was fascinating to read and what i did is i read all seniors were of those editorials and other newspapers and icharted out and i saw things he was writing on and how that changed over time and when i realized , reading those historical sources was that ac lee inspired harper lee to write the idealistic figure of atticus in particular mockingbird and you see that in some of the idealism in the principles that a.c. lee

showed on his editorial page when in the 1930s he spoke out about political demagoguery in southern politics which was rampant in southern politics in the 1930s. a.c. lee couldn't stand here we long. he thought he was available influence in southernpolitics . he was destroying his enemies and in a way that was very harmful to the public interest. couldn't stand eugene college in georgia. >> he wrote against lynching, he denounced lynching and defended law and order and the rule of law. and all this kind of thing so you can see how the idealistic figure atticus would come from her father but you read all 18 years worth and you begin to see also how her father is evolving over time and how her father is responding to these changes that are transforming tolerant society

and southern politics. by the 1930s, late 1930s but also during the war years, other life and politics in the war years so violently 1930s, a.c. lee is denouncing labor unions, couldn't stand labor unions and the way labor leaders were playing a role in national democratic party politics and then during world war ii, he really is when we begin to see the nascent civil rights movement and you begin to see national civil rights organizations having influence over the white house, overflight when roosevelt , not a huge influence one that was closely tracked by southern segregationists who didn't want to see anybreak in the diet of the wall of segregation , and you see how he begins to defend the states rights position and you begin to see how the articulates all of those

racist reactionary positions that atticus finch defends in "go set a watchman" so a.c. lee inspired both goals. both versions of atticus that we get. is important but the other thing i do in this book is i tried to track how harper lee is writing in the 1950s, why she's making the narrative choices that she's making. a lot depends on how she changed that's the story, moving from these 30s, telling the story through the eyes of scott, all of that affects how the character of atticus changes but it's also important i think to read the evolution of this character through the lens of changes in southern politics and development in southern politics in the late 1950s. so it's important to understand a more precise

chronology of the politics of massive resistance in the deep south in a state like alabama which we generally think about resistance at the beginning after the brown decision in 1954 and it did was really by 1957, 1958, 1959 and this was kind of the bizarro time in southern politics when politicians who had formerly been jokes for nobodies are winning public office or the first time and they're waiting on a platform of right wing demagoguery antisocial rights policies. this was the context in which harper lee is writing her fiction and i have some important things to say in the book about how i think that might have affected the way in which this character of atticus is evolving.

i go on to say more in the book about how the character of atticus changes in the activation of the movie which is its own creative process of course, adapting a novel to the screen . which conflict did so beautifully in his screenplay, and his adaptation that has important implications for the subtle ways in which the character of atticus changes and gregory peck the role when he embodies the character of atticus so it's a remarkable transformation that takes place in this character from the origins of the character in the figure that harper lee first writes in "go set a watchman" to when we get get gregory peck in his summation to the jury where he is so dignified face of mid-20th century american liberalism. it's a remarkable story and i

tell it blow-by-blow as it goes on. i want to close by reading a brief passage and i want to set it up briefly. it comes from the last chapter of the book and the last chapter which revolves around this delicious irony in american history. it happens in april 1963 what happens is april 1963 gregory finally wins his oscar. he been nominated for times and never one that he wins the oscar for portraying atticus finch and that's a great kind of moment for peck but also for harper lee and for this character but that same moment april 1963 in birmingham alabama, martin luther king is arrested protecting segregation in and sent to the jail and it's

from the jail that martin luther king writes a letter from birmingham jail and if there's any cultural production that is more widely read and assigned in school then "to kill a mockbird", it would probably be martin luther king's letter from birmingham jail. there's a famous passage he talks about white moderates and what is atticus finch if not all white moderate. he writes in letters, eyeholes come to the conclusion that it's not the citizens counselors or the klansman but it's the white moderates were the biggest stumbling block in the american struggle for freedom. it's a remarkable statement and one of the most awesome quote is the pieces from the letter from birmingham jail. but what's interesting about that too is to contextualize the letter from birmingham jail in the martin luther

king's larger work and ministry and in his politics. letter from birmingham jail becomes after chapter 3 of the book that martin luther king publishes in 1964 called why we can't wait and in why we can't wait in chapter 2, king is making a defense of nonviolence . and because nonviolence is under attack by 1964, by many people in the community who feel like nonviolence is not working. it's time to abandon nonviolence and king is trying to defend it. and he had this great line, he says i still believe there's something in the american egos that responds to the strength of moral force. >> in the american egos that responds to the strength of moral force. and who did he use as an example when responding to

the strength of moral force, he talks about the popularity of harper lee the novel and the movie to kill a mockingbird and the figure of atticus finch who exhibits moral force in his stand against the lynch mob that has, to get tom robinson from the jail so it's remarkable, this odd fact that in king's writings, there is both this condemnation of the white moderates and also this week in the strength of moral force and that's what harper lee believed in. that's what she was trying to conjure and in creating this character. i want to close with a passage that ends that chapter. king has a quote where he

talks about despite the violence that occurred in birmingham, or greater violence that has been threatened on one side, one side would not resort to it and the other side so often immobilized my confusion, uncertainty and disunity. and it's the disunited white south. that's the side of harper lee and her people were on. >> it was today that she had written a novel that would eventually be read and celebrated around the world as a timeless expression of universal values, moral courage, tolerance and understanding but she began project confused and uncertain in writing and all she wanted to recognize reconcile her abiding love and respect for her father with the hypocrisy and injustice that he and his generation of southerners have to easily abided.

all the while defending him from the condescension of the northern liberals yet through that process and she to the shipping politics of the day she stumbled upon a simpler narrative. the father inspired by his love and hope for his children doing the right thing in a time of crisis. and in that story, atticus rose to the occasion at the moment when it matter, >> of course, mockingbird doesn't tell us. we know itbecause in watchmen we see this other side . in mockingbird we know that only as the children do, because that's the internal logic of the novel. but the publication of watchmen however we know now that only that the atticus mockingbird was always too good to be true but that harper lee knew it as well. he knew all the things that jean moise discovers in watchmen. chris kindly paternalism

covert ugly beliefs about racial difference, that his willingness to represent black clients was in service of the racial status quo. california in all of macon's black population moved behind the veil. what as a child she had assumed was genuine reciprocal love and devotion across color lines was more like an elaborate intended to ease or whites, guilt and for lacks a burden of racial injustice. >> he knew all of these things and yet never told. >> why? and the answer, well, not really the whole answer but some version of the answer is at the end of the book you all should buy and figure it out. that's all i have to say, thank you for being here.

>> we did have questions and if you will raise your hand, you can get on tv and i will answer your questions.>> don't be intimidated. the lighting is so bad everybody, nobody will see you anyway. >> the person down front. >>. >> so gotcha. >> so i'm an english teacher and also a graduate student in english and analyzing literature through a historical context has come in and out of fashion in academia and i'm really interested in the line between literary critic and historian and the methodology

used to read both history and literature. did you find that the lines were blurred in writing your book, a history of the character?could you speak a little bit about? >> that's right. this is the biography of a fictional character. how do you do that? one of the great things is there are so many right ways to do that cause there's a right way, that means there's no wrong way to do it either and you can make it up as you go along. i do that to a degree. it is an interdisciplinary work of scholarship that primarily informed on my expertise in southern history and politics but it's also, there are period's where i do literary analysis and there is no kind of theory to it or there's no -- i just do the best i can and try to think deeply and historically about

the context in which harper lee was writing cause as a historian, that's central to our understanding that whatever we write whether it's fiction or nonfiction, we are shaped by the times in which we are writing and that really, there's a fundamental insight i bring to bear, that it and i tried to be very precise about the period in which she is writing and what's going on that might have shaped the kind of choices she is making. >> hi joey. great talk. and so the top you've just given about the two books, i the next two books will be read preferably by you in the future. and how does that happen? >> i wish i had the answer to

that. i would get to writing right away. but i think the question is, do you want the question? [inaudible] [laughter] right. so. [inaudible] i don't know, that's a good question. i think in my nextbook , one of the things that's great about being in a historian is i'm good about things that have already happened but the stuff that happened yet, i've got not much to say about. so it's hard to know and there are limits to what we can draw from our studies of history but what i find is a teacher of history is that there are people born every day who know nothing about what happened. so and when you think about

that it's almost overwhelming the work that historians need to do to educate us all and then there's the fact that the history we learned is so poor and it's been so shaped by previous understandings that are wrong or based on outright lies. so i'm not going to be about the work of predicting the future because i feel like there's so much work still to be done in trying to understand the past in a more vivid, vital, meaningful way. before that. my cousin. >> he's not a plant, i promise you. he came by himself, any other questions? >> i know you were downtown if you had any time to walk through that you museums and what do you think that?

>> i did, i spent the afternoon at the you museums and i think they are wonderful, wonderful institutions that are going to have a really meaningful impact on our understanding of our state's history. and then they are really awfully done, they are beautiful buildings, they are something that everybody in the state of mississippi can be extremely proud of and everyone in the state of mississippi needs to go to. >> and i thought they did a wonderful job of marrying the two . both and first, my reaction was quite unique to museums, why can't you have one museum of mississippi history because it's part of the same story there's this old story about how that happened and that totally makes but when

you go to it you see that there are professional archivists who are scholars of public history been incredibly awful about showing a very inclusive, powerful story about the state history. one that breaks some of the barnacles off of our history that we've all grown up with and you can see it clearly in a new and important way but also that relates the history of the civil rights area to that broader narrative and i think you've got to make clear to everybody you've got to go to both sides. you can't understand the civil rights story unless you understand that longer mississippi history. so i'm just enormously proud and as a mississippian of having those two museums in our state and i hope everybody will go see them many times. >> one more question back

there. >> the question of course is one i always ask about her early, did you gain any insight into that from doing the research for this book? >> i gain insight about it. i think the story that has often been told which is a good place to start which is that it was the phenomenal success of to kill a mockingbird would have been daunting to a novelist. how you come up with a follow-up to "to kill a mockbird", best-selling in the millions and all of a sudden is being hailed as this instant american classic so i think the pressure of that was daunting to her . but one of the things i've also found in this book is that i think, i needed in this book that in 1961 and 62

and 63 when she's getting those interviews and people are asking her what are you working on next, he never says what she's working on, she doesn't want to jinx it but if you look at what she's saying in interviews and what she's talking about, i think she was trying to go back to watchmen and to rework that novel because a lot of what she's talking about in those interviews are dealing with the same themes that the novel "go set a watchman" was dealing with and in some cases she repeats direct lines from "go set a watchman" in some of the interviews, it's interesting in the law i have some thoughts on why that would have been very difficult for her to do. why, because i think it would have been enormously difficult for her to go back to try to rewrite watchmen but i think she was trying to

do it for at least there's some evidence. >> any other questions? one more from the plant. >>. >> in the late 50s, he was. [inaudible] right, so this is part of the book in which i talk about the nuances of this massive resistance politics in 1950 and the argument i'm making here is that people did not, when the citizens councils were founded and the people who founded the citizens councils andlook , we're the decent folks in the town here. we on the businesses, we are the lawyers and the doctors. we are different from the ku klux klan was big in the

1920s and we are different from those folks who live out in the county and we are going to keep segregation but we're going to do it nonviolent, in a peaceful way and we're going to run the same. and that was the way they talk about the citizens council, that's the way they thought about themselves but what happened over the course of the late 1950s, it wasn't the citizens council that were keeping down his and the violence types in the plan. if you look, state after state in the deep south what's happening is if the clan and the more militant demagogue time that are radicalizing counsel. so that the people who were quote unquote good white folks are either going along for the ride or their slinky into a towering silence where they're keeping their head down and not saying anything for that. from the late 50s through the early 60s, this was

mississippi, madhouse been. that was one of the journalists who talked about it. this was mississippi the closed society. "over brothers in 1954 and it was happening in alabama too. adding in georgia, happening across the pizza so that's what i'm talking about. >> to select portfolio, this has been a lot of fun. [applause] >> here's a look at some of the current best-selling nonfiction books according to amazon. topping the list is jordan peterson's self-help book 12 rules for life, black kitchen confidential by the late elaboration anthony boarding. after that? does advice leading a happier life and a self-help called event planner and is no rr is look at human history.

sapiens. our look at the best-selling books according to amazon continues with the seven habits of highly effective people by stephen kobe and then it's a cell, a collection of essays. followed by daily shows trevor was memoir growing up in apartheid era south africa. next is educated, several leftovers memoir of her childhood in the mountains and her introduction to formal education at the age of 17 and wrapping up our look at amazon's nonfiction bestseller list is how to change your mind, michael collins report on how psychedelic drugs are being used for medicinal purposes. some of these authors have appeared on the tv. you can watch them on our website, booktv.org . >> it seems what we do between birth and the grave is so incredibly vital that some point west is fond of

saying we've become a culinary delight. the small exercise is not about realism, it's not to play with our human condition is about creating a shared, embodied sense of vulnerability and commonality. we ought tell you with arsenic because this moment, right here, right now affects all that we have and the infinite expansion and possibly contraction of this cosmos. i fear that i will not leave many of you with much full. we need something far more dangerous, something far more disconcerting, dramatic. it seems what i'm suggesting is compatible with party leadership. when it comes to discussing race, we must be like odysseus who dares to be adventurous and yet remains safe.

we must allow the sirens to sing to us without the safety of the mass. when it comes to infinite discussions regarding race, how it is live and how it is experienced and avoided, we must allow the strength of elliott torres, the unpredictable spaces of openness testifying norms and segments of prophecy and body orientations. we must be daring, we must be vulnerable which means that we must often be wounded. we must be open to rethink how we are already changing. more specifically when it comes to the courageous discussions regarding race and whiteness we must ask i think more of the white people. white people must be open to die a necessary. and i'm not talking about physical death but a death to white stubbornness. on to white denial, white

innocence, ignorance, a death to white arrogance , narcissism. a death to white fear, a death to white privilege, a death to white denials, a white self righteousness. a death to white illusions of safety and innocence. a claims of non-complicity, a death to all those tricks that white people play. to convince themselves that they are fine, that they are sophisticated, the uncomplicated white power. i know about the risk and failure to white others requires death, that require what michael and body since experiences. i published a piece on trayvon martin and the article generated 600 comments. one white man wrote your stock in trade is white guilt. why the you not pedal your own problems? you pedal your white patron.

i read your screed on a summer's eve. you write like one. there's a special place in hell for those that lead others astray. say hi to teddy kennedy and hitler when you get there that's a nice one . >> .. home to texas tech university and a hub for the regions agricultural and cotton industries. it has a population of about 253,000. we will visit with local authors like paul carlson. >> lubbock is the center of a huge cotton industry. we raised more cotton in this general area than any place in the united states,