Atticus Finch Comes to Hampton, NH

 

Sometimes, people will surprise you.

In deepest Red Virginia, Hanover County, where Donald Trump carried the vote by 27 points, at a meeting of their county council, a throng of protesters demanded that the county not enter into an agreement with ICE to use an empty warehouse for ICE prisoners.

In Rockingham County, New Hampshire, a board comprised of three county commissioners, one Democrat (Katie Coyle) and two Republicans reversed itself, one Republican joining Ms. Coyle to defeat a contract to set up an ICE jail in the County.

Atticus Finch

And Wednesday night, in Hampton, NH, the school board defended its unanimous vote against recommending the adoption by the town of a warrant article to set up a slush fund for the town's Catholic school, using taxpayer dollars for a religious school. This, in a town where the biggest voting block is the Catholic church. This in a state where state vouchers for private schools, religious schools are draining away money from public schools.

During the Deliberative Session, each board member was attacked by name for what congregation members believed was betrayal, anti-Catholicism and personal immorality.

Who are these women? Mad Dog has met three of the five: Wendy Riga, the town librarian and the chairman of the Board, Candice O'Neill, an attorney in town, and Andrea Shepard who has voted for the warrant article in past years, whose husband voted for it when they were on the Board together. And Molly McCoy and Sarah Elliott with whom Mad Dog has only a nodding acquaintance. 

By the bizarre rules of the Deliberative Session, which does not allow for "back and forth" --heaven forbid public officials be allowed to reply to citizen's concerns directly--the Board members simply sat there looking at their detractors, as members of the congregation, passioned alumni of the school, the school principal waged war against them. 

But they did not waver, did not reverse their votes, as they might have done.

They stood firm. Stood tall.

Mad Dog was inspired by the book and even more by the movie, "To Kill A Mockingbird," where Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) , a town lawyer defends a Black man accused of molesting a white woman. The courthouse floor is packed with angry white men and women who want to drag his client, the accused, out to lynch him, but Finch methodically picks apart the case against his client, which is clearly fatally flawed, and it is obvious the man is innocent. But Finch goes further: he speaks to the assembled townsfolk and says, "But what is Tom Robinson's real crime? Why is he really sitting in this docket? His real, unforgivable crime in this town is having felt sorry for a White woman." 

There, he said it. 

Of course, the jury finds Robinson guilty anyway. There was never any question about what the townsfolk would do with respect to the verdict. 

When Atticus gathers up his stuff to walk out of the courtroom, he has to walk under the balconies where the Black folk, the town's Negroes are allowed to sit. Among the Negroes is Scout, the daughter of Atticus. A woman next to her tells her, "Stand up, child. Your father is passing!" All the Negroes rise as Atticus walks by, mute testimony to a man who braved the censure, the hate of his fellow townspeople on behalf of a principle, on behalf of the law, the truth and something that rises above hatred and ignorance.

But that was fiction.

John F. Kennedy, before he was President wrote "Profiles in Courage," a book about eight American politicians who held resolutely to principle, despite attacks from their own party and friends: among them Daniel Webster and John Quincy Adams. 

Mad Dog hopes that someday a course at the Academy, maybe Civics, maybe history will teach about these five Hampton women who stood up to the hostility and intolerance of their own town that Hampton children might learn about what makes a nation a nation of laws rather than passions.