To Kill A Mockingbird’s crusading lawyer has come back to the book’s sequel as a bigot who attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting and opposes desegregation.
The book’s sequel entitled Go Set a Watchman has shocked many fans when reviewers revealed that Atticus Pinch, one of the most revered characters in American literature, is a racist.
In the first book, Atticus, the small town Alabama lawyer, risks his physical safety to defend a black man charged with raping a white woman.
The novel features Scout, a six-year-old tomboy in Mockingbird, as a sexually liberated woman in her 20s returning home from New York to Maycomb, Alabama, to visit Atticus.
In one of his many conversation with his daughter, Atticus said: "Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters? Do you want them in our world?" he asks Scout, according to reviewers.
He also says: "The Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people."
Scornful of federal decrees ending segregation in US schools, Atticus says: "Can you blame the South for resenting being told what to do about its own people by people who have no idea of its daily problems?"