Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    My Father and Atticus Finch: A Lawyer's Fight for Justice in 1930's Alabama
    My Father and Atticus Finch: A Lawyer's Fight for Justice in 1930's Alabama
    My Father and Atticus Finch: A Lawyer's Fight for Justice in 1930's Alabama
    Audiobook6 hours

    My Father and Atticus Finch: A Lawyer's Fight for Justice in 1930's Alabama

    Written by Joseph Madison Beck

    Narrated by Tom Stechschulte

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The story of Foster Beck, the author's late father, whose defense of a black man accused of rape in 1930s Alabama foreshadowed the trial at the heart of To Kill a Mockingbird. As a child, Joseph Beck heard the stories-when other lawyers came up with excuses, his father courageously defended a black man charged with raping a white woman. Now a lawyer himself, Beck reconstructs his father's role in State of Alabama vs. Charles White, Alias, a trial that was much publicized when Harper Lee was twelve years old. On the day of Foster Beck's client's arrest, the leading local newspaper reported, under a page-one headline, that "a wandering negro fortune teller giving the name Charles White" had "volunteered a detailed confession of the attack" of a local white girl. However, Foster Beck concluded that the confession was coerced. The same article claimed that "the negro accomplished his dastardly purpose," but as in To Kill a Mockingbird, there was evidence at the trial to the contrary. Throughout the proceedings, the defendant had to be escorted from the courthouse to a distant prison "for safekeeping," and the courthouse itself was surrounded by a detachment of sixteen Alabama highway patrolmen. The saga captivated the community with its dramatic testimonies and emotional outcome. It would take an immense toll on those involved, including Foster Beck, who worried that his reputation had cast a shadow over his lively, intelligent, and supportive fiance, Bertha, who had her own social battles to fight. This riveting memoir, steeped in time and place, seeks to understand how race relations, class, and the memory of southern defeat in the Civil War produced such a haunting distortion of justice, and how it may figure into our literary imagination.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateDec 16, 2016
    ISBN9781501948022
    My Father and Atticus Finch: A Lawyer's Fight for Justice in 1930's Alabama

    Related to My Father and Atticus Finch

    Related audiobooks

    Biography & Memoir For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      What to Do After Decades of Teaching ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Wrong?

      Jan 16, 2019

      We’re tasked with teaching a book that doesn’t live up to its longstanding responsibility of delivering a recokining with American racism. The post What to Do After Decades of Teaching ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Wrong? appeared first on The Millions.

      12 min read

    • Article

      ‘Transcendent Kingdom’ Offers Quiet Hope In The Face Of Racism

      Sep 29, 2020

      In Yaa Gyasi's second novel, the daughter of a troubled immigrant family finds a way to combine science and faith in her career as a neuroscientist.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Looking At Slavery Without Looking Away. The Challenge Of ‘Underground Railroad.’

      Jun 3, 2021

      A question raised in the TV version of the novel “The Underground Railroad,” a Monitor reviewer says, is apropos now: Where can Black people be free?

      4 min read

    • Article

      White People, Black Authors Are Not Your Medicine | Yaa Gyasi

      Mar 20, 2021

      In 2018, two other novelists and I were being driven back from a reception in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, to our hotel in downtown Detroit, when we saw a black man getting arrested on the side of the road. The driver of our car, a white woman who had sp

      6 min read

    • Article

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary

      Jun 17, 2020

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary
      7 min read

    • Article

      Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Hamya, Wolitzer, and More

      Aug 31, 2021

      Here’s a quick look at some notable books—new titles from Jo Hamya, Hilma Wolitzer, and more—that are publishing this week. The post Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Hamya, Wolitzer, and More appeared first on The Millions.

      3 min read

    • Article

      In Conversation With Heather Morris

      Sep 26, 2019

      Heather Morris is author of international bestseller The Tattooist of Auschwitz, a fictionalisation of the story of Lale Sokolov, a Slovakian Jew, who fell in love at a concentration camp. Her new novel, Cilka’s Journey, is the much-anticipated seque

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Uncomfortable Whiteness of Contemporary War Literature

      Oct 17, 2017

      One can hope that we might draw lessons from the Vietnam War’s legacy of near-erasure of non-white experiences; that the growth of veterans writing workshops and anthologies will represent to future generations a more complete picture of The Forever

      8 min read

    • Article

      Mary Sanchez: What’s justice for Emmett Till in 2022?

      Jul 6, 2022

      Emmett Till is as relevant today as when the 14-year-old was brutally murdered, nearly 67 years ago in 1955. This isn’t because a needle-in-a-haystack search of dusty old files recently turned up an unserved warrant. The document names the woman who

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Senate Judiciary Committee Sets A New Low

      Sep 28, 2018

      Hell hath no fury like an entitled man scorned. America met that man on Thursday, in all his caustic glory. He's federal Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, now well on his way to becoming the next U.S. Supreme Court justice. What a performance! The belligeren

      3 min read

    • Article

      Fragile Evidence

      Nov 1, 2021

      In 2008, just after college, I spent the summer traveling across Texas in a midnight-blue Corolla with a crooked “Yes We Can!” Obama bumper sticker. I’d been hired by a new organization called the Texas After Violence Project, founded by Walter Long,

      11 min read

    • Article

      A Pearl Of A Biography

      May 3, 2022

      John Boessenecker, a San Francisco trial lawyer and former police officer, has also become one of the leading historians on crime, outlaws and lawmen of the Old West. A recipient of both a Spur Award from Western Writers of America and a best book aw

      3 min read

    • Article

      I Was a Juror on a Murder Trial, And I Still Can’t Let It Go

      Feb 22, 2019

      Being a juror had never been something I was familiar with—very far from it, actually. I had grown up in Paris, France, and my interests had always been in fashion and the music industry. I lived in both Europe and the U.S., traveling back and forth,

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Woman Who Caught Epstein

      Jul 30, 2021

      The Woman Who Caught Epstein
      12 min read

    • Article

      Meet Julie K Brown, The Woman Who Brought Down Jeffrey Epstein

      Jul 25, 2021

      The town of Palm Beach in Florida, the crime writer Carl Hiaasen has observed, “is one of the few places left in America where you can still drive around in a Rolls-Royce convertible and not get laughed at.” It’s an unironic island, filled with the s

      12 min read

    • Article

      Becoming an American Citizen in the Age of Trump

      Sep 26, 2017

      I felt my first real twinge of regret about not being a U.S. citizen in 2008, when Barack Obama was elected president. An American university where my father once worked as a professor had helped secure green cards for my whole family, in 1992. (I wa

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for My Father and Atticus Finch

    3.5/5

    10 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Interesting! Comparison of Harper Lee's fictional story and Beck's father's actual trial - although not that close in description COULD be related... even with Lee's specific denial of any knowledge of the author's father's trial. Kept me reading and that's a win.
    • 3/5
      A son's exploration of a case that presented his parents (as yet unmarried) with a moral and ethical challenge long before his birth. Joseph Madison Beck researched the arrest, trial and execution of a black man accused of raping a white woman in South Alabama in 1938. There are some parallels to the story line of To Kill a Mockingbird, and Harper Lee may have heard something of this case as a child (she was 12 years old when it was happening), but when asked decades later she acknowledged the similarities but said she had no recollection of knowing about it. Regardless of whether she did or didn't, the differences are really more striking than the similarities. The defendant, Charles White, was a "healer" and fortune teller from Detroit, had a criminal history, and was no Tom Robinson. He was neither deferential nor sympathetic; refused to accept his counsel's advice, and chose to take a chance on receiving the death penalty rather than accepting a plea bargain that would have saved his life. The alleged victim was a 20 year old woman whose mental age was purported by her attorneys to be no more than 12, removing any question of her ability to consent to whatever may have happened between her and White. Unlike Mayella Ewell in the novel, who was never examined by a doctor, she was examined, and medical testimony established that she was unbloodied, unbruised, and still a virgin immediately after the "attack". Foster Beck was not an established respected attorney; he was young, unmarried, with his career yet to be made. Sadly, his agreement to act as Charles White's defense attorney, and his persistent efforts on White's behalf, including appealing his conviction to the Alabama Supreme Court, probably ruined any chance of a prosperous future in private practice in his home territory. White was well protected by the local Sheriff and a large contingent of State Police officers during his imprisonment and trial. The author was hampered by not having begun his research into the case until his parents and many of the other participants were no longer available; letters that might have filled in holes in the history had not been saved. The public record was nearly all he had to go on. I found it a bit disturbing that he occasionally let his own surmises about significant unrecorded conversations guide his narrative. That must often be true of narrative non-fiction, but it was not particularly skillfully managed here. He includes a lot of family history of both his parents, which was mildly interesting, but not especially illuminating, and he was often pointedly repetitious to the point of insulting the reader's intelligence.Although I read through this book quickly, and found it interesting as documentation of a failure of justice, I can give it no more than a weak 3 stars.