Question: Why Write? Answer: See Below

"I wanted you to see what real courage is....it's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what."

     
                                                                      ~ Atticus Finch

I submit, as Exhibit A, the above photograph.  Proof that Maycomb, Alabama really does exist.  Home to Scout and Jem, Boo and Dill.

Atticus Finch trod these shining floorboards.  He thumbed his pocket watch and quietly reminded his fellow citizens that no one human being is superior to any other human being.  Man or woman, adult or child, black or white.

It sounds so simple.  It seems so very obvious.  But in 1961, the year of my own birth, this concept, these words, were anything but simple or obvious.  People were dying in the streets of Alabama, on the back roads of Mississippi, in the hollers of Kentucky, because they were men and women of real courage.  They knew they were licked before they even got on that bus, or walked down that sidewalk, or sat on that stool in a cold, unwelcoming diner.

They were licked, but they started anyway.

Some of them started and ended on the very same day. They never knew that a writer like Harper Lee would, in her own, quiet way, speak for them.

She spoke for all of us fifty years ago, and she speaks for all of us today.

"I think there's just one kind of folks.  Folks."

                                                                           ~ Scout 

I sat in this jury box and looked out at that courtroom.  I heard Atticus soberly address the pinch-lipped, slit-eyed jury.  I saw Scout and Jem peering down, wide-eyed and afraid, from the shadowy balcony.  I smelled the sweat of Tom Robinson's fear.

And I wondered:  put me in that box in that town in that time.  What would I have done?