When The New York Times Magazine published “The 1619 Project” in August 2019, it consciously challenged the nation’s historical anniversaries and apparent principles, centering racial slavery as the United States’ founding economic and social framework and the root cause of its enduring divisions. The special issue earned its creator Nikole Hannah-Jones the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, and its impact was extended via live events, free educational materials, bestselling books, podcasts, and an Emmy-winning documentary series—all of which helped advance its “New Origin Story,” the subtitle of Hannah-Jones’s 2021 book version of The 1619 Project.Footnote ¹ Unpopular with conservatives from the outset, 1619 produced an immediate political flashpoint, igniting historically specific debates about slavery and the American Revolution, in particular, which raged with a ferocity unprecedented in response to popular historical media. In 2020, President Donald Trump announced his opposing “1776 Project,” dismissing the New York Times’s efforts as “toxic propaganda, ideological poison” determined to “dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together.”Footnote ²

For academic historians too, there was much to grumble about. Reactions to Hannah-Jones’s project have revealed wider tensions within the discipline, as David Waldstreicher and others have documented.Footnote ³ The idea of 1619 as an important date in American history, however, was hardly a novel concept; it had in fact been expounded via books, lectures, and seminar debates for decades. Incensed by the New York Times’s claims of a previously “untaught” history, professional historians offered significant rebuttals—most notably James Oakes and James McPherson, who resented the extent to which the Times flattened or simply ignored the debates central to their fields. Far from nostalgic advocates of “consensus history,” generations of professional historians have transformed how millions of high school and undergraduate students are taught about race and slavery. Their success was evident as early as the 1980s, Oakes writes, when Reagan-era conservatives began to “complain endlessly” about a “multiculturalist” repositioning of U.S. history.Footnote ⁴

In the wake of The 1619 Project, and as the nation grapples with the meaning of its semiquincentennial, right-wing concerns about history in schools have evolved into a moral panic. A promotional video for Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s “History Rocks!” tour, a supposedly nonpartisan but distinctly conservative initiative for the United States’ 250th birthday, spotlights The 1619 Project alongside flag burnings, the removal of a statue of Christopher Columbus, and a drag performer reading to children.Footnote ⁵ In the face of such hostility, critiques from historians, like the wider misgivings about The 1619 Project that emerged from the left, have been overshadowed by the perceptible importance of 1619’s narrative in challenging Trumpian attacks on democracy and minority groups. While critics have mounted concerns that The 1619 Project replaces one patriotic vision with another and effectively erases the realities of the United States’ overseas empire and domestic Indigenous expulsion, its accessible liberal vision remains an important cultural lifeline for those concerned about what is at stake in the current political moment.Footnote ⁶ Americans must talk of their country “through a redemptive language,” the legal scholar Aziz Rana writes, lest the country “come apart at the seams.”Footnote ⁷

Such language, as implied, leaves little room to explore how hard-fought domestic progress coexisted with an expanding imperial order. While some African Americans and other marginalized groups drew strength from the U.S. Constitution and its associated expectations of exceptionalism, that same document served as “an ideological basis for international arrangements under American supervision.”Footnote ⁸ Indeed, Rana’s critique of the “quintessentially American worldview [that rendered it] increasingly difficult to imagine the country without its Constitution or its global dominance,” foregrounds the twentieth-century, and particularly the post–World War II liberal order, as the drivers of our current moment—limiting rather than enhancing our ability to identify meaningful solutions to our contemporary ailments.Footnote ⁹

Nevertheless, there remains an obvious, ostensible power in the rallying cry to protect what’s left of the United States’ hard-won multiracial democracy. As The 1619 Project demonstrates, current levels of racial inequality cannot be blamed on “Trump’s nasty racial politics.” Racial divides in the United States are the product of generations of normalized white supremacy, developed and sustained across political lines. A return to “normality,” as the sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva notes, may be a desirable aim for many Americans given the current circumstances, but it leaves the door wide open for a return to “Whiteness as usual.”Footnote ¹⁰ By continuing to define the boundaries of protest via the icons and conditions of the past, the criticism goes, we limit our ability to rise to the present.

A key limitation, of course, is the consistent failure of liberals to reconsider the political restrictions imposed by their own nostalgia. In the original version of the “1619 Project,” published in The New York Magazine, this was evident from the first pages, which alerted readers to the theatrical revival of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird—a 1960 novel once referred to as “a kind of secular scripture” due to the uncompromising adoration it has elicited among generations of American readers.Footnote ¹¹ In this double-page advertisement for Aaron Sorkin’s Broadway adaptation, already a massive success since its opening in December 2018, “The 1619 Project” inadvertently confirmed that its revision of American history would not destabilize Atticus Finch’s sovereignty, a possibility seemingly beyond the remit of its seismic reconsideration of race in U.S. history and culture.Footnote ¹² On the contrary, those associated with the Broadway adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird no doubt appreciated the opportunity to align their production with “The 1619 Project,” and to position their narrative within the magazine’s framing of race.

Over the course of this essay, I will explore the reestablishment of what I term the “Mockingbird creed” during the past decade, despite existential threats to its liberal legacy and a wider shift in mainstream American culture’s engagement with race during the same period. The public rejection of alternative visions of Atticus Finch in favor of those that evoke a nostalgic past suggests a profound limitation in contemporary cultural politics, in which liberals can prove as resistant to reconsidering previous heroes as their conservative counterparts. Profoundly ironic but certainly no mistake, the advertisement for Sorkin’s To Kill a Mockingbird in “The 1619 Project” constituted the latest chapter in what historian Joseph Crespino dubbed “the strange career of Atticus Finch” in a 2000 essay for Southern Cultures. Documenting the then-modest critiques of Lee’s character advanced by a handful of legal and literary scholars, and their contestation by “Finch defenders,” Crespino’s article prompted an unprecedented backlash, as documented in a later “letters to the editors” feature.Footnote ¹³ Advertising To Kill a Mockingbird in “The 1619 Project” reconfirmed what Crespino posited almost twenty years earlier: that “Atticus’s place within the American imagination” reveals “major fault lines in the struggle for racial equality.” As a beloved cultural figure forever associated with the mid-century “liberal consensus,” Atticus’s continued but ever-evolving deployment by fans, politicians, critics, and scholars offers an ongoing source of analysis for those interested in “how competing groups have framed racial issues in America.”Footnote ¹⁴

In May 2018, just months before Sorkin’s play debuted, Crespino published a full-length Atticus “biography,” which remains the premier scholarly analysis of Lee’s character as both literary and cultural figure and the influences and experiences that guided Lee’s creation. In exploring Atticus’s origins, Crespino guided readers through an ongoing paradox that emerged three years earlier in 2015, when Lee published her only other novel, Go Set a Watchman. Written before, but in close proximity to, Mockingbird in 1957, Watchman positioned the beloved Finch as a white supremacist—a member of the White Citizen’s Council, mobilizing with friends and allies to oppose Brown v. Board of Education in Lee’s contemporary era. Watchman confirmed “that the Atticus of Mockingbird was too good to be true,” Crespino argued. But more dramatically, it confirmed that “Harper Lee knew it as well.”Footnote ¹⁵

Critics writing in response to Watchman’s publication had predicted the “toppling of Atticus as a moral icon,” a process that appeared “attractively modern and nuanced” in the midst of consecutive racial crises that focused the world on the enduring reality of white supremacist violence and structural racism in the United States.Footnote ¹⁶ The killings of Trayvon Martin (2012), Eric Garner, and Michael Brown (both 2014), to name but a few, like the mass uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri, were assessed in the context of texts like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010) and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations” (The Atlantic, 2014), which popularized a powerful confrontation with race that was well established by 2015. Less than a month before Watchman’s publication that July, a white supremacist murdered nine African Americans at Charleston’s Mother Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, prompting an overdue public reckoning with the Confederate flag.

Amid this swirling cacophony of racial violence and public handwringing, Go Set a Watchman’s acknowledgement of the racist systems of middle-class white Southerners at mid-century offered an uncomfortable but historically relevant read. It even shared a publication date (July 14, 2015) with Coates’s Between the World and Me, a pessimistic reflection on enduring racial injustice in the United States, and the tendency for white liberals to revel in “specious hope.”Footnote ¹⁷ Coates marked this most American of publishing coincidences by confirming that he had never read To Kill a Mockingbird and did not intend to, an admission that the journalist Ryu Spaeth interpreted as “an indication of the irrelevance of Mockingbird to the black experience, even as it remains absolutely essential to the white understanding of America’s racist past.”Footnote ¹⁸ Though he did not explicitly name it, the Mockingbird creed has, since the 1960s, helped sustain what Coates calls “an apparatus urging us to accept American innocence at face value”—an articulation of American exceptionalism that never seems to precipitate “subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard.”Footnote ¹⁹

In Watchman, Lee invited us to see the dark truth at the heart of Atticus’s paternalism, a fitting revelation for the contemporary historical moment. But like Lee’s protagonist Jean Louise Finch (formerly known as Scout), most readers chose to compromise with the Atticus they thought they knew, rather than the one in front of them. As a result, the icon emerged relatively unscathed after the initial shock of the novel’s revelations. Most readers simply rejected Go Set a Watchman’s narrative, and questioned its provenance. They did not get mad at Atticus, or at the historical actors who manifested Massive Resistance in real life; instead, they got mad at the publishers, agents, booksellers, and anyone who seemingly saw historical, literary, and indeed financial value in Lee’s attempts to grapple with the turmoil of the 1950s. Though some sympathetic reviewers argued that Watchman was simply “Harper Lee for grown-ups,” or that discourse about the book’s literary merit proved a convenient cover for those who sought to avoid its central revelations, the majority of readers, as Alfred L. Brophy summarizes, treated Watchman “like a dead rodent, to be held at arm’s length while it was taken to the garbage.”Footnote ²⁰ Many Lee fans, like Aaron Sorkin, chose not to read Watchman at all.

Harper Lee approved Hollywood producer Scott Rudin to oversee a stage adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird in June 2015, just a month before Watchman’s release, scandal, and rejection. Over the next few years, as media speculation grew about the direction of the adaptation, Aaron Sorkin spoke of his desire to work only from the 1960 novel. The author eschewed an earlier dramatic adaptation by Christopher Sergel and even the 1962 movie, though he admitted it was already “too late” on the latter; “I had seen it 100 times already.” In his quest for creative purity, Sorkin maintained particular distance from Lee’s more recent publication, noting, “I wanted to be able to hook up a polygraph and say that I didn’t read Go Set a Watchman.”Footnote ²¹ While his adaptation would attempt a modest repositioning of To Kill a Mockingbird’s prominent but mostly silent Black characters, its content and marketing implied that recent revelations about the evolution of Atticus’s racial attitudes did not exist. As a result, and despite some distinctive amendments to Mockingbird’s narrative discussed further below, Sorkin’s production helped reconstitute rather than probe Atticus’s heroic status in American literature and culture, cocooning him back into Mockingbird’s 1930s setting at a time when many other white heroes teetered on their pedestals.

Atticus’s rehabilitation was in full swing, but Sorkin was not entirely responsible. According to a lawsuit filed by Harper Lee’s estate after her death in 2016, Atticus, as presented in the original novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, was “a model of wisdom, integrity, and professionalism,” based on Lee’s own father. Sorkin’s adaptation should ensure that “any spin put on the characters, not least Atticus, does not contradict the author’s image of them.” Ironically instigated by those who published Watchman in the first place, most notably Tonja Carter, Lee’s lawyer and executor, the forces governing Lee’s estate here restricted “the author’s image” to that of Mockingbird. The “author’s image” displayed in Watchman was seemingly off limits before most readers could even process it.Footnote ²²

Disturbed by the playwright’s initial efforts to reaffirm Atticus for the Trump era, which appear to have included the apparent character flaws of alcohol consumption, cursing, and gun ownership, Carter categorized Sorkin’s original framing of Atticus as being “more like an edgy sitcom dad in the 21st century than the iconic Atticus of the novel.” She demanded that certain scenes be cut before the play’s opening in December 2018 and objected to the addition of two new characters, including an African American physician called to give evidence during the narrative’s courtroom scenes.Footnote ²³ Sorkin later joked that, had the production company and Lee’s estate not settled out of court, he might have had the opportunity to “hear a federal judge decide what imaginary people would and wouldn’t do.”Footnote ²⁴ Despite these legal difficulties, Sorkin refused to renege on his promise to avoid Go Set a Watchman, an oversight presented as common sense in a media landscape already accustomed to dismissing the novel as a “controversially published early draft of ‘Mockingbird.’”Footnote ²⁵

Carter’s protective nature was presumably prompted by the fallout from Go Set a Watchman, impacting the extent to which Sorkin was able to convey anger and frustration with Atticus’s civility in the face of violent white supremacy. Intriguing interviews in advance of the play’s Broadway debut included Sorkin’s reflection on the 2017 protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a “Unite the Right” rally resulted in the murder of a counterprotester, Heather Heyer, and the injury of many more. When President Trump implied a moral equivalence between far-right activists and counterprotesters, Sorkin publicly lamented Atticus’s tendency to accept rather than confront the racism of his neighbors.Footnote ²⁶ This tension informs a central plot device in Sorkin’s adaptation, driving Atticus’s combative relationship with his African American housekeeper, Calpurnia, who frequently reminds her employer that the whites of Maycomb that he considers misguided neighbors and friends are, to her, simply “monsters.” Calpurnia is devastated at the end of Tom Robinson’s trial, but, unlike Atticus, she is not surprised.Footnote ²⁷

Sorkin’s Atticus also receives considerable criticism from his children, most notably his son Jem. While this generational tension was evident in Lee’s novel, Sorkin’s barbs are more pointed. Attempting to spur his father into more direct action against the town’s racists, Jem asks Atticus what he would have done during the Civil War. When Atticus jokes that he would have hidden under the bed, Jem implies that his father’s response is perhaps more revealing than he intended. Jem later informs the audience that he regrets implying that his father was a coward, an example of how Sorkin’s adaptation often pushes its characters in new, more modern directions, only to restore them to mid-century acquiescence.

Indeed, the play works in numerous ways to expose the limitations of Atticus’s polite racial moderation, but it nevertheless leaves its characters and audiences no choice but to conclude that the small-town white lawyer remains the best man for the job of managing the South’s racial progress. In Sorkin’s concluding scenes, Scout informs the audience that Atticus took a bill to the Alabama state legislature that sought to permit African Americans to serve on juries in the aftermath of Tom Robinson’s trial. The bill failed spectacularly, Scout says, but Atticus was ahead of his time. Aside from the fact that this is a significant diversion from the novel, where Atticus dismisses Jem’s insistence that he “go up to Montgomery and change the law,” it is also ahistorical.Footnote ²⁸ Such a law already existed by the time Tom Robinson went to trial in summer 1935, a product of the Scottsboro cases, and in particular, the Supreme Court case Norris v. Alabama (April 1935), in which the justices unanimously concluded that the systematic exclusion of African Americans from juries violated the Fourteenth Amendment.Footnote ²⁹

Despite the obvious parallels between Tom Robinson’s case and those of the nine “Scottsboro boys” falsely accused of raping two white women in 1930s Alabama, To Kill a Mockingbird made no reference to Scottsboro or the legal changes it brought when published in 1960 or adapted for the screen in 1962. While the educational resources released to accompany Sorkin’s production cite Scottsboro as a likely influence on Lee’s imagination, the play itself extends the original narrative’s tendency to imply that the infamous trials never happened, a trend that, as Isaac Saney has written, obscures not only the case itself but the extent to which Black and other progressive forces mobilized around it.Footnote ³⁰ When twenty-first-century audiences are advised that the movement to integrate Alabama’s juries was instigated by Atticus Finch, Sorkin revives Lee’s original obfuscation, implying that “the entire Black community existed in a complete state of paralysis.” The mass mobilization of many Americans horrified by the conduct of the initial Scottsboro trials is obscured once again, in a manner that feels particularly out of line with the liberal intentions of Sorkin’s adaptation.Footnote ³¹

Such a fallacy, if noticed at all, had little impact on the play’s success. Sorkin’s play ultimately grossed over $40 million dollars in its opening six months, making it the most profitable American play in Broadway history and the capstone of a banner year for Mockingbird—2018—in which three books were published on Lee for a general audience and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) declared it the nation’s favorite novel.Footnote ³² When the play reached London in 2022, I was struck by the media’s attempts to apply the Mockingbird creed to the contemporary political moment, celebrating Sorkin’s adaptation as an opportunity to “understand” and “combat” Trumpism. Tom Robinson’s accuser Mayella Ewell and her family were characters with “modern-day resonances of Trump’s left-behinds,” according to the Guardian’s theater review. When the Ewells “sneer at Atticus’s intellectual elitism, [they] could be today’s forgotten populists of the rust-belt.”Footnote ³³ Such simplistic assumptions about Trump’s voter base, disputed and disproven since they emerged in 2016, generate contempt toward an assumed white working class voter, blaming them for a political regime enabled and elected by wealthier voters and corporate interests.Footnote ³⁴ It is also worth noting that Sorkin’s depictions of Maycomb’s racist mob are in fact more extreme than those Lee envisioned at mid-century, or were depicted in the 1962 movie, donning white hoods and articulating specific allegiances to the Ku Klux Klan.Footnote ³⁵ Bob Ewell, in particular, Mockingbird’s central villain, takes on a cartoonishly unsubtle quality in Sorkin’s adaptation, extending rather than complicating the film’s tendency to scapegoat the penniless Ewells for Maycomb’s racial intolerance.

Lee’s vision of 1930s-era Alabama incorporated middle class racism too, as exhibited by many of the Finches’ neighbors, including the women’s missionary circle and the elderly Mrs. Dubose, who kept a Confederate pistol under her shawl while taunting the Finch children about their father’s decision to defend a Black man. This more nuanced depiction of the town was significantly flattened when the narrative was adapted for Hollywood, with Robert Mulligan’s film restricting the pathology of racist thought to poor whites alone, and cementing a more limited vision of Maycomb for generations to come. The film was also essential in redefining Atticus as the narrative’s central figure, significantly expanding the time allocated to the trial scenes compared to the novel, on the basis that they enabled Atticus “to emerge as courageous and strong.”Footnote ³⁶

In Watchman, Lee undercut national myths that the mid-century “Negro Problem” was “the result of an abstract (and therefore politically intractable) psychic ‘schism,’ or even an inborn racism.” It was, as literary scholar Rachel Watson continues, “a regime enforced and reproduced by ongoing, sophisticated strategies on the part of whites in power to maintain the exclusion of blacks—and often poor whites—from political life and juridical protection.”Footnote ³⁷ When considered on their own terms, both of Lee’s novels therefore suggest a stronger understanding of both race and class than either the Mockingbird film adaptation or the fallout from Watchman suggest.Footnote ³⁸ Lee’s characters reflected the withering of Southern liberalism in real time, and the emergence of “moderates” who upheld segregation with every tool available to them, but who despised the uncouth forces of unrestrained white rage, such as Eugene “Bull” Connor. Despite Atticus’s commonly cited morality in To Kill a Mockingbird, his teachings have long been interpreted as “allegory for the South’s own temporality and its public philosophy of race relations: Go slow.” Such analysis, advanced by literary scholar Eric J. Sundquist twenty years before Watchman’s revelations, highlights how academic critiques of Atticus are not new, but have tended to bypass the general reading public.Footnote ³⁹

Without a doubt, To Kill a Mockingbird’s powerful hold on liberal America rests on the original novel’s temporal proximity to the civil rights movement. It was published on July 11, 1960, five months after four Black students from North Carolina A & T College staged sit-ins at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in downtown Greensboro, and two days before John F. Kennedy secured the Democratic nomination for president. The novel’s association with this historical moment helped to shape the “conventional wisdom” that center-left Americans would ultimately draw from the 1960s, which, as Aziz Rana writes, centralized “a common civic nationalist frame as a precondition for social cohesion and ameliorative change.” Atticus’s defense of Tom Robinson fits neatly within a wider narrative that attributes the civil rights movement’s successes to Americans who “rallied to the creedal story of the country’s inherent, historically unfolding moral goodness.” Reflecting and reshaping a profound faith in national institutions and foundational documents, this liberal “romance of American nationalism” obscures a much more complicated reality.Footnote ⁴⁰ Indeed, the Mockingbird creed endures because it undermines racism, “and the paroxysms of violence that it produced, [as] aberrations in [U.S.] history.”Footnote ⁴¹

Today, more than a decade after readers rejected Go Set a Watchman’s invitation to overcome what journalist and celebrated author Isabel Wilkerson called “the false comfort of embedded racial mythologies,” it seems clearer than ever that this neglected “unmasking of the nation’s mythical conscience” constituted a public failure, demonstrating the limited intellectual development of liberal audiences despite decades of societal and political change, and an ongoing process of racial reckoning that was promptly expanding beyond a “moment.”Footnote ⁴² Where Mockingbird appealed to the nation’s obsession with “the southern mind,” Watchman revealed what Watson deemed “a far less mystical, but far more amoral, elite will to power.”Footnote ⁴³ Had it been embraced, or even simply accepted, Watchman might have prompted a more nuanced understanding of elite interests and minority rule, stronger terrain from which to mount a meaningful cultural challenge to the current crisis in American democracy.

The publication of Go Set a Watchman should not have been a scandal, but an opportunity to break free of a myth that never was: a myth just as powerful and pervasive as those under scrutiny in The 1619 Project. Mockingbird’s position as one of postwar America’s most powerful “race novels”—to use James Baldwin’s terminology—must be understood within the context of the political hegemony of its era, rather than as an indicator of significant racial reform.Footnote ⁴⁴ “The strange career of Atticus Finch” tells us less about a national rejection of white supremacy, and more about how white elites made peace with Cold War imperatives, sustaining rather than dismantling racial hierarchy through token gestures, rejection of interracial populism, and public commitment to states’ rights and political moderation. Positioning themselves as the worthy heirs of the constitutional tradition, the majority of white Southern lawyers, businessmen, and politicians did not fear Atticus Finch’s egalitarian vision of the rule of law. Rather, they celebrated his ability to protect sectional interests in a manner unthreatening to the national, seeking entry to the booming postwar economy without racial conciliation.Footnote ⁴⁵

Perhaps there is never a good time to delve into the crucible that was the post-Brown white South. But the reestablishment of the Mockingbird creed over the past decade, despite the evidence of Go Set a Watchman and the reality of a wider political shift on race, offers a fitting cultural representation of what is at stake in abetting national myths, the political implications of which abound in Rana’s assessment of Constitution worship. While many liberals have traditionally chafed at the Constitution’s inflexibility in the face of many contemporary issues, it is frequently cited as the nation’s bulwark against fascism. Americans will need to be much more creative, and think beyond their flawed documents—political and fictional—if they are to meet the challenges of the present.