Where reality and film meet... maybe

As I was reading a section in Black, White, and Southern about the plight of the black southern sharecropper during the early part of the 20th century and into the Great Depression, I could not help but think about the relevance of this excerpt to a major section of the plot from In the Heat of the Night. When Detective Tibbs discovers that local cotton kingpin Eric Endicott stands to lose much of the menial, and mostly black, labor that grows and picks his crop if the recently deceased entrepreneur Colbert builds a factory that can employ many of the farmhands for better wages, the police officer suspects Endicott is somehow involved in the killing. As he and Gillespie drive through the cotton fields that lead to Endicott's mansion, a somber blues tune hums in the background as they pass row after row of black field hands. I could not help but think of not only the struggles of these workers as I read about the vicious circle of dependence and subsistence created by predominantly white land owners and growers in the Deep South, but also the parallels between reality and fiction that I was making. Just as Colbert offers the African-American community a new opportunity for modest prosperity in Heat, David R. Goldfield notes in B, W, and S that the New Deal that accompanied the Great Depression combined with the sudden need for factory and war supply workers during the late 1930s offered African-Americans, particularly in the American South, an opportunity to remove themselves from the grips of modern slavery. Through government assistance that provided funds for seed, fertilizer, and other basic tools of agricultural trade as well as the bold work of WPA director and former NAACP officer Harold Ickes, African-Americans were given small and gradual assistance in enduring the Depression. Similarly, workers were needed in munitions factories and other plants in order to help with the war effort as the 1940s arrived. One southern black leader noted "that the white man cannot lick Hitler with his right hand and keep the Negro down with his left." As optimistic and clever a realization as this was, for all the opportunities granted to blacks, many who were trained as engineers and skilled laborers during the war were without work afterwards. In the same sense, much of the TVA works maintained the prejudices of the early 20th century, and other public works programs gave pay raises to menial labor positions that had once been occupied by blacks that were soon appealing to southern whites. It is no surprise then, that as Heat is set in the mid-1960s, the death of Colbert and the uncertainty of the factory's future likely leaves blacks in Sparta, the same blacks given hope by the New Deal and WWII some 30 years earlier, feeling marginalized nonetheless.

To segway into my next viewing, I began research today on reviews and reactions to the much-revered To Kill a Mockingbird, a film based on the classic novel of the same name by Harper Lee. Mockingbird tells the story of the young Scout Finch and her upbringing in a racially divided Southern town. It is, however, more than a coming of age story; Scout's father Atticus is a local attorney who agrees to defend a black man accused of rape. It is a story of justice and courage and the heroism of a white man fighting to save a black man. While I have located the reviews from the New York Times and Variety magazine, I have also found several interesting articles, including one on an African-American actress and her experience with the film as well as perspectives from black scholars on the movement to censor the novel's offensive language as well as the critical reaction to the notion of a "white race hero." Finch, considered to be one of the greatest heroes and good guys of any work of literature of film, nonetheless represents, for many African-Americans, the quintessential white hero saving the passive black.  I will explore this further after reading these articles in full and viewing the film. But I will leave you with this: in my readings about the black sharecropper in the American South I found a very intriguing excerpt about the “survival skills” employed by tenant farmers in the early part of the 20th Century. 

Black Sociologist Charles S. Johnson: "for those blacks still living in the country there is, it would appear, one unfailing rule of life. If they would get along with least difficulty, they should get for themselves a protecting white family. This lingering paternalism sealed black dependence."

           Is Atticus Finch a character, then, founded in or at least paralleling the realities of the 1930s, 40s, and even 50s? (The film itself is set in the 1930s) Is he a white protector? Or is he, as both a character in the novel and movie, a representation of Hollywood and literary tendency to portray certain whites as the saviors of oppressed blacks? Is this portrayal fair and just (like Atticus Finch himself)? I don't know what answer I will find, or if it will be the right one. Until then...