If I have a daughter, I'll want her to be like Scout, the plucky heroine in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. This book was easily my banned book choice to end this week of blog posts about all of our favorites.
To Kill a Mockingbird is banned mostly for profanity and racial slurs. It is the dialog about race in this book which made me begin to question the issue of racism as a junior high student, picking this book from a summer reading list. Scout questions racism throughout the novel as a child would, which allowed me to think about discrimination in ways I hadn't before.
Now that I work for the ACLU of Maine, I'm rethinking the characters in this book. I think Atticus Finch would have been an attorney at his local ACLU affiliate. He clearly believes every person deserves legal representation, even when the case might be unpopular.
