Academy Award Nominee Speaks at NOVA in Manassas

Mary Badham played Jean Louise ‘Scout’ Finch in the 1962 movie, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ and on Tuesday, April 26, visited the Manassas Campus of Northern Virginia Community College to talk about the impact the book has in  classrooms worldwide to this day.

Badham was invited to the college campus as part of the Reading Across the Cirriculum Program, which features the Harper Lee Pulitzer Prize-winning book.

 “It [To Kill A Mockingbird] is required reading in all of the schools in the United States, as well as a lot of countries around the world,” Badham said.

Badham said the book is a popular pick for many of the communities around the country that participate in the Big Read, a program “designed to restore reading to the center of American culture,” according to its website.  

The book was  made into an award-winning film, and Badham, described as a childhood star, was nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of the 10-year-old 'Scout' in her first acting role.

At the time, she was the youngest person to be nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category, according to a press released issued by the college.

 “This book and this film has been very near and dear to my heart…and it’s really sort of defined my life,” Badham said. “I’ve spent a lot of time traveling around, not just in the United States, but the world, talking about ‘To Kill A Mockingbird.’”

 According to Wikipedia.com, the book is loosely based on Lee’s observations of her family and neighbors, as well as on an event that occurred near her hometown in 1936, when she was just 10 years old. The books is known for dealing with the serious issues of rape and racial inequality.

The storyline and characters are still studied today because of its message of tolerance and denouncing discrimination. Badham said her 18-year-old son was currently studying the book in school.

The book has been instrumental in “talking to kids about the way things were” in the 1930s, Badham said. The book shows how it was a “white man’s world” and if you were black, a woman or a child, you had no rights, she said.

Badham talked about how nothing had changed in her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama in the 1960s when she returned home from California after filming the movie for five long months in the state. Badham said she was not happy when she returned home from filming; she was exposed to “different races mixing” on the west coast, and when she returned home the only thing that had changed was the laws— Alabama was still segregated in the 1960s, she recalled.

 One story she told to the crowd in the Colgan Theater to highlight the continuing racial tension in Alabama during that time was when she had allowed the young black boy who delivered groceries to her family’s home in the dining room for a drink of lemonade. Her father sat down with her and told her she could never do that again because it would cost the family; her father’s business “could be sabotaged,” she recalled.  Badham was 14 years old at the time and had to leave Alabama.

 “If I can’t be friends with somebody because of the color of their sin, I had to leave Birmingham,” she said.