READING/ "To Kill A Mockingbird" with a Generation of New Americans

Those of us who grew up in the United States and attended public schools probably remember reading Harper Lee's novel about racial justice and human dignity "To Kill a Mockingbird" sometime during our middle or high school years. I read it in middle school; most of my classmates were white and a few were African Americans. Now, as a high school English teacher, I am reading this story with students whose faces reflect every continent on the globe. This experience shows me how reading beautiful books can help us recognize universal truths that transcend time and place and culture.

The powerful and controversial novel, published in 1960, takes place in Alabama during the Great Depression and is told from the point of view of a little girl, Jean Louise Finch, who goes by the nickname Scout. The heart of the plot is her father defending a black man falsely accused of rape. Atticus Finch defends Tom Robinson even though he knows the all-white jury will convict him of a crime he did not commit, a crime, in fact, we discover never took place.

Most of my students are either recent immigrants or the sons and daughters of immigrants. My students' home-countries have ranged from Guatemala to Ghana. They do not necessarily know the history of the United States in great detail; Alabama to them signifies the home of a well-known college football team and nothing more. Often in my classes I am the only person with fair skin.

And so I have the job of explaining to them a bit about the Civil War, Jim Crow laws and the Civil Rights movement. And as we talk, they understand that they too, would have been subject to cruel racial segregation laws, drinking from "colored" water fountains or banished from restaurants and hotels and universities merely because their skin is a few shades darker than their teacher's.

This world of racial prejudice appears to be largely unknown to my students; their school friendships span culture and race and the things that seem to matter the most to so many characters is Lee's novel. And yet, her novel speaks powerfully to them because its message of tolerance and the dignity of all people resonates across generations and cultures. More than one student asked me today if any of the characters in the book were real people.