this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
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A lawyer who confronts the white people of the whole village with their racism. The way he makes them all see loud and clear that their choice is either to stand by their racism and let a child rapist who raped his own daughter (and does a lot of other bad things) go free because he has the same skin colour as them and drag themselves down to his level, or to admit that a white person could commit such a crime. On that day, no one in the courtroom could lie about what decision they made, that it was made solely out of racism, and what the price was. Tom paid the ultimate price, but everyone in the courtroom paid a price too. None of them got off scot-free.
Do you really think that hasn't changed something? That doing the right thing is only worth something if it changes the world immediately? Atticus may not have saved Tom, but he made a difference, because everyone understood that Tom was innocent. If more people made that kind of difference, we would live in a different and better world. People who are racist need to be confronted with the damage they are doing, why they are doing it, and the damage they are willing to do to themselves and others.
And of course the children needed an explanation. They were hoping for immediate change, a happy ending, and they understood the explanation better than you, it seems.
It's one thing to be angry at the system and feel helpless, it's another to give up and just shrug your shoulders because "there's nothing I can do about it" or to use what's there and do the best you can and make the change you can. If Atticus had not used everything the system gave him and not defended Tom, the result would have been the same for Tom, but the people in the courtroom would have been able to pretend that everything was fine, that Tom was guilty and cheer for Tom to be convicted. He took that away from them, they left the courtroom with their eyes down, because they put a proofen innocent man into jail. He won. Believe it or not, the far from perfect court system, even in a village like this, allowed him to force them to look in the mirror.
And yet the whole world is still feeling bad for MLK getting murdered so many years later, he will stay in every American's mind forever, his death a stain on this country because people saw his humanity, his death made them feel ashamed. Even you needed to mention him. He was working within the system, he won. His words are still present and an inspiration. He changed more than burning cities did. Without his work and dedication the burning cities would just have been meaningless violence easily dismissed as Black people being bad by the racists. Even the people who ignored racism and pretended everything was fine understood through him that there was something wrong, that change had to happen. Violence and destruction alone will always only spread fear and change who is the next oppressor, good people can change the world into a place where we all hinder oppression to happen, where we don't need oppressors anymore.
And it was the system who brought the housing rights act. Boring, peaceful lawyers who were there waiting for their chance to make something good happen inside the system. Witout them the fires would have burned out and everything had stayed the same until the next violence.
The Civil Rights Act was passed 4 years before MLK died.