The city depicted in To Kill a Mockingbird just elected its first Black mayor.
When Charles Andrew was a boy in Monroeville, a city in Alabama that today numbers under 6,000 residents, he used to watch the 1962 film adaption of To Kill a Mockingbird in the town’s segregated, single-screen theater.
“It didn’t strike me that we were sitting in the Black section of the theater,” Andrew told AL.com. “Being a child at the time, and being the first time going to the movies, I was kind of awestruck.”
Harper Lee’s fictional town of Maycomb, which the original book and film unflatteringly depict in the post-Depression years, when Jim Crow was the law of the land, was based on Monroeville. This was Lee’s own hometown.
In a mayoral election last week, Andrew defeated an incumbent and made history as the first African-American mayor of Monroeville. Andrew had previously worked jobs in public safety and law enforcement.
Unfortunately, Monroeville hasn’t had the best record in the noteworthy book-to-movie pipeline.
Bryan Stevenson’s memoir Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, which was adapted into a movie starring Jamie Foxx and Michael B. Jordan, told the story of a Black man from Monroeville, Walter McMillian, who was wrongly convicted for murder and sentenced to death.
Fortunately, that ruling was ultimately overturned.
Aaron Robertson
Aaron Robertson has written for The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and elsewhere. His translation of Igiaba Scego's novel Beyond Babylon (Two Lines Press, 2019) was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Prize and Best Translated Book Award.
