Myths die hard, because credulous men need myths to make a modicum of sense out of an inscrutable world. So it comes as no surprise that the reaction to the revelation in "Go Set a Watchman" that Atticus Finch was an old-fashioned racist ranged from shock to disbelief to cynicism.
As a journalist who covered Alabama for 25 tumultuous years between 1954 and 1979 — years in which "To Kill a Mockingbird" was written and the movie version filmed — I always thought the Atticus Finch created through the considerable talents of Harper Lee and Gregory Peck was just a little too good to be true.
In Alabama it is widely accepted that Atticus Finch was based largely on Nelle Harper Lee's father, Amasa Lee. Amasa died in 1962, at the age of 82, after the book but before the film came out.
I knew Amasa Lee a bit. He was a lawyer, and he was also the weekly newspaper editor and an elected Alabama legislator. Everything I learned about him indicated that Amasa Lee was a typical "Southern moderate," which meant that like virtually all white Southerners of his time, he believed that segregation was something divinely ordained. But as a "moderate," he drew the line at resorting to violence to maintain "the Southern Way of Life." When it became clear that the old order was dying, to his credit, Amasa Lee urged acceptance of the new order with as little discord as possible.
But to those whose faith has been shaken, let me assure you that there really was a flesh-and-blood Atticus Finch. His name was not Amasa Lee, but rather Clifford Judkins Durr. Harper Lee probably never met him, but it's all but certain she would have known him by reputation.
Cliff Durr was born at the turn of the 20th Century into a stable, privileged Montgomery family replete with Confederate ancestors. As the youngest child, he was doted on and spoiled by his parents and four siblings. But he became especially close to a grandfather whose farm lay near the town of Wetumpka in the foothills of Appalachia.
There, on a summer visit when he was 12, while riding horseback on a country road, he encountered a legendary ghost who inhabited a murky creek. He fled in terror to tell his grandfather, who told him to get back on the horse and go back to confront the ghost. With great trepidation, he went back to discover that the summer shadows had somehow tricked him. He sheepishly reported this to his adored grandfather, who told him: "Now let that be a lesson. Don't believe every silly tale you hear." It was a life-shaping lesson that he never tired of telling.
Cliff proved to be a stand-out student, and when he finished college at the University of Alabama he won the first Rhodes Scholarship that went to an Alabama boy. At Oxford, he took his degree in law.
Back in Alabama in 1924, he pretty much accepted the usual Southern attitudes, especially when it came to race. He seemed headed for a drearily conventional but lucrative career as a corporate lawyer. Then he met a comely Southern belle named Virginia Foster, and they soon married — at about the same time Virginia's older sister Josephine married another up-and-coming young Alabama lawyer named Hugo Black.
If ever there were a match made in heaven, it was Cliff and Virginia Durr. Together, just by looking around them, they began to shed their bred-in-the-bone racial views. When the nation fell into the Great Depression, Cliff heeded the call to service as one of the Young Turks of the New Deal. In 1942 he was named to the Federal Communications Commission, where he laid the foundations for public broadcasting.
His term ended just as the dark clouds of the post-war anti-communist hysteria were gathering, and he declined reappointment to the FCC because he couldn't conscientiously administer the "loyalty oath" program. For a while he stayed in Washington, representing mainly ordinary bureaucrats who got hauled before assorted witch-hunting committees. Often when he'd get home after one of these sessions, he'd go to the bathroom to throw up.
He could have joined one of the "super-lawyer" firms that arose in the 1950s, but he chose instead to go back to his native Montgomery. When friends asked him why he would make such a strange reversion, Cliff would simply quote the wisdom of Br'er Rabbit: "De briers, dey may scratch sometimes, but it's my brierpatch."
With Virginia as his secretary, he set about establishing a conventional one-man law practice. Then on a fateful day as Christmas approached in 1955, one of Virginia's new friends across the racial divide named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on the local bus. Cliff and Virginia went to the police station to get Rosa out of the genuine peril of an Alabama jail.
Once this hit the papers, his fledgling law practice evaporated. How they persevered with virtually no income remains a mystery, but he used idle time to build, with his own hands, a rustic cabin on a remnant of the farm his grandfather had tilled.
There he and Virginia spent their final years. At first it didn't even have indoor plumbing, but the place became a lodestar for the throng of adoring friends the Durrs had accumulated — people like their former neighbor during their New Deal days, Lady Bird Johnson.
Lady Bird's husband Lyndon never visited, but shortly before his death in 1972 he wrote Cliff a warm personal letter in which he said: "A long, long time ago, you taught me so much, by precept and example, about the dignity and opportunity to which each is entitled regardless of color, birthplace, ancestry, and all of the ways in which many have been ignored and disdained."
By the time of his death in 1975 — Virginia lived on for another 20 years — Montgomery had begun to look upon Cliff as the very embodiment of courage and integrity, without a trace of sanctimony. As editor of the local newspaper, I was asked to say a few words at a little memorial service at the Montgomery courthouse. I said simply that those of us who were fortunate enough to know Cliff Durr found that we had been imbued with something of a second conscience, that when we were confronted, as all we are, with a moral dilemma and we were tempted to take on the protective coloration of the landscape, there was a small voice that kept asking: "But what would Cliff Durr think?"
Ray Jenkins is a retired editor of the editorial pages of The Evening Sun. His email is rayjenkins1@live.com.