It seems fitting, then, that it would prompt us to examine our own past during the tumult of the civil rights period. IU senior Lauren Haynes has assembled three slide shows documenting three charged moments in this history. In light of this year’s Themester theme, Good Behavior, Bad Behavior: Molecules to Morality, we are bound to consider the kind of precedent that they set.

1. The Black Market Arson

In the Fall of 1968, IU’s African-American students and faculty opened the Black Market on Kirkwood Avenue, a community center and hub for students underserved elsewhere. Early in the morning on December 26, 1968, two members of the Ku Klux Klan, Carlisle Briscoe and Jackie Kinser, firebombed the Black Market. After the attack, racial tensions rose and a large group of African American students gathered outside the rubble to protest the racism of the campus and community. Rollo Turner, a student activist, delivered a speech in which he staid that peace between the races was dead. Many members of the community and the University spoke out against this perceived call for reprisal, for fear of further violence and unrest.

Is this period—the 1930s, the Depression—a particularly difficult one to dress?

The difficulty of the 1930s is that it’s a period that we can’t readily shop. Clothes from the 1960s, 70s, and beyond are fairly easy to find at thrift stores, vintage stores and online retailers. But clothes from the 30s mainly have to be recreated; those that remain are generally too fragile to handle the wear and tear of a theatre run.

That said, Cardinal has put on a number of shows that take place in this period—The Grapes of Wrath, Annie, even The Sound of Music and The Diary of Anne Frank are quite close. So the Cardinal costume shop is quite well stocked with coveralls, drop- waisted dresses and hats for ladies and gentlemen alike. We were also fortunate that the Indianapolis Repertory Theatre generously opened its stock to us; several of the play’s key pieces are from its collection.

What were the challenges of costuming To Kill a Mockingbird?

Mary Badham as Scout the 1963 film of To Kill a Mockingbird

Well, one complexity is the influence of the iconic film. Since many audience members will conjure up Gregory Peck and Mary Badham when they think of Atticus Finch or Scout, any costuming decision must necessarily take those choices into account. For instance, when I went looking for glasses for Atticus to wear (generously supplied by Optiks, on the downtown square), there were frames named “Gregory Pecks” that were inspired by the ones the actor wore in the film of To Kill a Mockingbird. The frames are lovely, but they read 1960s instead of 1930s, and for that reason we chose instead the circular wire frames he wears on stage.

Gregory Peck in his Oscar-winning performance as Atticus Finch; the glasses frames are now iconic.

In other cases it was more obvious that we must deviate from the film’s precedent. Our Boo is 6’5”, and he cuts a very different figure from Robert Duvall, so it was not difficult for me to start from a blank slate. In trying to think through what a man who keeps indoors might look like, it occurred to me that it might be smart to fashion him in the image of the children he watches. He is a person in a state of arrested development, likely infantilized by his father, why not bring that out in his costume by dressing him like Scout and her brother, Jem? It helps, of course, that many of the men of the town wear overalls too—the choice doesn’t seem so outlandish.

Jean Louise’s dress, hand-sewn from the early 1960s.

Another figure that had no cinematic precursor was Jean Louise, Scout’s adult self and a stand-in for Harper Lee. We decided to dress her in clothes from the period of the novel’s publication—roughly 1960. But after looking at a number of Jackie O-shaped dress-suits, Randy found that the contrast between her look and that of the rest of the play was too strong. We chose to go instead with a 1960s dress in a color scheme fitting with the rest of the play, so that she is both within the world of Depression-era may comb and outside of it. Plus the subtle check of the dress picks up on the gingham that Scout wears with her overalls. We wanted to keep the link between those two characters subtly present in their clothing.

What was the most fun for you?

An illustration of children playing from the 1930s. One of the complexities of using illustrations like these as evidence is that they don’t relate very clearly to the look of a small Southern town in the Depression.

It’s always delightful to dress kids. Not only are they charming people and talented actors, they take great joy in dressing their parts. And the costumes really come to life on them, because kids scamper and jump around and fully enjoy the strangeness of becoming someone else. I particularly enjoyed putting Dill’s costume together. Randy wanted him to be an eccentric kid—part dreamer, part savant—and I got to thinking about what he might carry or wear that would bring those traits across. I particularly like his shirt with all the flags on it, and the raccoon tail pinned to his sweater vest. In my head, he has assembled his own uniform for a Scout troupe of his own invention.

What advice would you give to aspiring costume designers?

That you can never tell, really. Sometimes there are costumes you think you won’t have a hope of finding, and then they pop up in the first thrift store you enter. We have an actor with size 14 feet, and to my great surprise, I found a number of lovely size 14 shoes at the eastside Goodwill, as if they were waiting for me to come and find them. Then other, seemingly easier items become unexpectedly tricky—I spent some time looking for a brown bow tie, for instance. The hardest part is staying patient and keeping to your vision and not scrapping good ideas for the sake of expediency.

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This pamphlet, printed in 1934, advertises an organizational meeting of the International Labor Defense to organize a protest on behalf of the Scottsboro defendents. Notice the concern over “bloody lynchers” and the cruelties of the Southern prison system.

Also in 1934, the NAACP rallied behind a federal anti-lynching bill sponsored by Senators Robert F. Wagner and Edward Costigan. The bill stipulated that lynchers, as well as state officials who did not enforce the law, would be punished and fined for their actions. Southern senators defeated the bill by filibuster.

In this letter, from April 2, 1931, Dr. P. A. Stephens, a black physician and president of the Methodist Episcopal Church Layman’s Association, asks the NAACP for support defending the “Scottsboro boys.” The NAACP and the International Labor Defense vied for the right to represent the wrongly accused in their several retrials. The NAACP lost the bid because at the time, it lacked a full-time legal staff.

A 1944 letter from Harry T. Moore, president of the Florida NAACP, to Thurgood Marshall, then senior counsel for the NAACP  (he would later become a Supreme Court Justice).  Moore describes the difficulty of bringing lynch mobs to trial–particularly when local members of the police and justice system may have actively participated in the lynchings. Moore and his wife, Harriette, were killed by a bomb planted under their house by the KKK on Christmas night of 1951.

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IU President Herman B. Wells congratulates Thomas Atkins on becoming student body president in this photo from 1960

On July 11, 1960, J.B. Lippincott and Co. published Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. In his biography of Harper Lee, I Am Scout, Charles Shields writes that Mockingbird “… seemed to have tapped into the important concerns of the era,” particularly “the growing national interest in civil rights for blacks.” The impression wasn’t accidental. In 1960, the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing, and Lee voiced her strong support of the Rev. Martin Luther King: “I think Reverend King and the NAACP are going about it in exactly the right way.”

Indiana University played a major role among American universities in this movement. On April 7, 1960, Thomas Atkins became the first African-American student body president at Indiana University and the first Africas-American student body president in the Big Ten. He won the election narrowly, by 45 votes. That night, some IU students opposed to his election burned crosses around Bloomington and then came together to sing segregation songs. It was clear that Atkins had a lot of work ahead of him to unite the student body.

Atkins ran for office as a representative of the Independent party, meaning that he wasn’t affiliated with any of the Greek-sponsored political parties that had monopolized the office for the previous decade. His goal was to create a fairer, more equitable social climate for the students of Indiana University. He strove to lessen discrimination against blacks and women on campus and to make student government a democracy, rather than a mouthpiece for established fraternities and sororities.

During his time as Student Body President, one of Atkins’s first actions was to persuade local barbers to offer their services to African American students. He went to visit local barbers to speak with them personally. When that didn’t work, he and Indiana University President Herman Wells held a meeting with Bloomington’s local barbers in which Wells stated that he would add eight more barbers to the student union’s barbershop to specialize in African American hair if they weren’t willing to serve the black community. The meeting worked, and the color line in one corner marketplace was broken.

Another achievement of his presidency was the Board of Student Standards, which continues to set the benchmarks for student conduct, honesty, and responsibility. Atkins also established the student review of faculty teaching by implementing course evaluations, and under his tenure, student representatives were first appointed to the University’s Board of Trustees. He was active in the development of the African American Studies Program, which was founded in 1961. But perhaps his most conspicuous legacy was his desegragation of the residence halls, across both racial and gender lines.

Atkins helped black students who did not live on campus by sponsoring a bill (“M-12”), which argued that the University needed to take a more active role eradicating discrimination in the community. The debate on this bill brought in an audience of over 300. A delegate from the Housing office, Mr. Adams, and the president of the local NAACP, Mr. Scott, squared off on the issue of the limits of the university’s reach. Mr. Scott argued that the University should address the prejudice of the town against students of University, while Mr. Adams argued that the University had no control over the prejudice of private citizens. While Mr. Adams’s point won the argument and killed the bill, this senate meeting carried a lot of weight with the African-American students of Indiana University and the local business owners. It proved that the African-American students were going to fight for their rights and that local businesses would have to contend with the consequences of their prejudices.

Atkins also advanced The Brotherhood Commission, whose mandate was to investigate reports of discrimination on campus, in residence halls, sororities and fraternities, and in Bloomington’s local business establishments. The commission assured African-American students at IU that the University was actively participating in the desegregation of the campus and the community.

Atkins’s term as Student Body transformed Indiana University during the Civil Rights Movement. With support from President Wells, Atkins pursued the desegregation of the campus as well as the community of Bloomington as a whole. He remained extremely conscientious about the authority accorded his role. As Atkins said in an interview for the IDS, “Power is colorless. It’s like water. You can drink it or you can drown in it.” As Student Body President at IU and then as a civil rights attorney for the NAACP, he made the IU a more equal, more welcoming campus for all.

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Childhood

On July 11, 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird was published. It was a day that would change forever the life of Harper Lee as well as countless admiring readers. Yet Lee has never written another novel since and has become somewhat cynical about the fame that her masterpiece brought her.

Nelle Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama on April 28, 1926. Her Father, Amasa Coleman Lee, was the son of a civil war veteran who ran a “staunch Methodist home.” Lee’s mother, Frances Finch Lee, was the daughter of a successful farmer in Finchburg, Alabama. She and A.C. Lee married when he was 19 years old. They moved to Monroeville where A.C. worked as a lawyer and Frances was a stay-at-home mother of three.

Nelle was named after her maternal grandmother, Ellen Finch, spelled backwards. As a child, she met Truman Streckfus Persons, who later changed his name to Truman Capote, author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood. Tomboy Nelle stuck up for Truman when he was a bookish child living with his aunt in Monroeville, and he became the inspiration for the character Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird. The two were close friends and stayed that way for the majority of Capote’s life.

The Novel

After high school, Nelle attended the all-girl Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama where she studied English literature. She then transferred to the University of Alabama where she meant to follow her BA with a Law degree. Returning home to Monroeville, Lee found that she wasn’t cut out for the family law business, and dropped her legal studies  to pursue a career in writing. Much to her father’s disappointment, she moved to New York, where she reunited with Capote. To make ends meet, Lee worked as an airline ticketer and wrote in her spare time. She befriended fellow Alabamians Joy and Michael Brown who welcomed her into their home as though she were a member of the family. On Christmas of 1956, the Browns gave Lee the present that would change lives forever.  They gave her a year’s monetary support so that she could quit her job and devote herself completely to writing.

During that year, Harper Lee wrote the first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird. Eventually, she found Tay Hohoff, an editor at J.B. Lippincott & Co., who helped her over two years of revisions and rewrites. When at last it was published, To Kill a Mockingbird became an immediate success and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961.

Although the Lee family is very private, it has publicly denied the pervasive view that the novel is autobiographical. And yet it features clear and strong resemblances to Lee’s childhood. Capote confirmed that Dill was modeled on his young self, and Scout bears strong resemblance to the young Lee. Atticus Finch is likewise based on A.C.’s persona; as Lee explained in an interview, “Atticus’s view of life” was that of her father, who “believed that people are basically good, capable of improving, and as eager as the next person for a better future.” She also confessed that she hoped the novel would make her father proud of her choice to become a writer. Since Atticus Finch has become one of the most respected literary characters of the 20^th century, To Kill A Mockingbird is widely recognized as an extraordinary homage of a daughter to a father.

There are other grains of truth in the novel’s fiction. Most conspicuously, the trial at the center of To Kill A Mockingbird was inspired by the trial of the Scottsboro Boys, in which nine young black men were accused of raping two white girls, Victoria Price and Ruby Bates. The event is now recognized as one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice of the Jim Crow era.

Life after Mockingbird

After the success of her first novel, Lee tried writing others, but the pressure of creating another blockbuster was too much for her to bear.  Lee gave her last interview in 1964 and then moved back to Monroeville to live with her sister Alice. Since then, she has refused interviews, convinced that journalists were interested only in her personal life and the ways it might be shaped to fit the story they wished to write.

In subsequent years, Lee has kept herself secluded from the fame that her first novel brought her. It is tempting to read the reasons for her retreat from celebrity in the lines she writes about Boo: “Taking the one man who’s done you and this town a great service and dragging him and his shy ways into the limelight, it’s a sin.” As Lee has said, “[I]f you know Boo, you know why I’m not doing an interview”.

Perhaps we should let the work speak for itself. In To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee has shown millions of young people and adults that we can know and like each other irrespective of the differences that mark us. She has shown that it’s OK not to share the outlook of the majority and that looking at situations with a childlike innocence is sometimes the best way to see good and bad, black and white, and all the gray in between.

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