Media personalities, civil rights figures and educators have been responding to the death Friday of Harper Lee, the author of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” including Oprah Winfrey.
In an article in The New York Times, Oprah Winfrey recalls an encounter with Lee, writing: “Meeting Harper Lee on a rainy day in New York for lunch … I will always remember how feisty and southernly charming she was, telling me, ‘No, honey, I will not be doing an interview, I’ve already said everything I had to say.’”
In the same article civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson is quoted saying: “’To Kill a Mockingbird’ created an alternative way to think about race and the legacy of racial inequality, where people of color were seen as folks who deserve protection of the law.”
Author and filmmaker Mary McDonagh Murphy says of Lee, in the article: “There are many questions that go to her grave. Her stubborn refusal to speak to the press after 1964 leaves us with all those questions that are never going to be answered. We never get to ask her why she stopped writing and what she really thought about all the attention, or what she thinks about race currently versus what she wrote about in the late 1950s.”
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