My father and Atticus Finch

The author's father courageously defended a Black man charged with raping a White woman in 1930's Alabama. His father was Foster Beck, the trial was the State of Alabama vs. Charles White, Alias, and it was much publicized when Harper Lee was twelve years old. It is the trial that was the inspiration for Harper Lee's book, To Kill a Mockingbird. And it is the trial that the community was heavily invested in with its dramatic testimonies and emotional outcome. It took an immense toll on those involved, including attorney Foster Beck. Joseph Madison Beck, himself an attorney, talks of his family's history and how race relations, class, and the memory of Southern defeat in the Civil War produced such a haunting distortion of justice, and how it may figure into our literary imagination.