‘My Father and Atticus Finch’

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird remains a fundamental text in American education.

But the prequel, Go Set a Watchman, published in 2015, surprised readers, who encountered a different Atticus: an attendee of White Citizens’ Council meetings who sees the “Negro population” as “backward” and “unable to share fully in the responsibilities of citizenship.”

Many were repulsed by Watchman, but Mockingbird’s Atticus was no simple white hero. For example, his righteous defense of Tom Robinson is complicated by his admission that he had “hoped to get through life without a case of this kind.”

Joseph Madison Beck offers a fascinating counterpoint in My Father and Atticus Finch: A Lawyer’s Fight for Justice in 1930s Alabama. Mr. Beck’s father, Foster Beck, was a real-life Atticus who also unsuccessfully defended an African-American man, Charles White, wrongly accused of rape. It’s an ugly tale of police misconduct and unalloyed racism that is, unfortunately, still resonant today.

In Mockingbird, 6-year-old Scout couldn’t tell us the full story. Mr. Beck can’t, either, but I believe that My Father, with its representations of Foster Beck and Mr. White, offers an important complicating lens through which to view Lee’s Atticus and Tom and our complex legacy of racial injustice.