With African-American studies in the spotlight in college curricula, and racial tensions stirred up by the display of the Confederate battle flag, it is a bizarre coincidence that 89-year-old Harper Lee has just released a second novel, Go Set A Watchman, that contradicts what her fans and the public expected as a sequel to her 1960 best-selling To Kill A Mockingbird. Or, according to the New York literati, the evil Rupert Murdoch — whose empire includes Harper Lee’s publisher HarperCollins — is the capo of a conspiracy, involving Lee’s attorney, to publish the first draft of Mockingbird (with subtle changes) as a new book to make more money.

In Mockingbird, the larger-than-life white lawyer Atticus Finch was a Southern pro-black advocate in one of the most segregated states in the South. His character was drawn through the eyes of his seven-year-old daughter Jean Louise, nicknamed Scout — obviously the young Harper Lee. To Scout in Mockingbird, Atticus was the paragon of the ideal politically correct white male in the Deep South. But the just-released Watchman redraws Atticus through the now grown-up eyes of his formerly worshipful daughter who, at age 26, recognizes a dimension of Atticus that shakes her childhood belief in her father’s racial virtue.

The new book’s portrait of Atticus Finch in Watchman is not nearly so easy to admire. At age 72, he is inconsistent in his feelings about race, asking his now adult daughter Scout if she could live under integration. Says Atticus: “Do you want your children going to a school that’s been dragged down to accommodate Negro children?” Scout now sees her father in a a new light, one that has stunned her fans and caused nervous breakdowns among politically correct university English and literature faculty. Their role model for white Southerners has been torn down like statues of Stalin during the collapse of the Soviet regime.

Now we know that Harper Lee’s original draft of Mockingbird depicted a realistic, conflicted Atticus, who defended a black man based on his allegiance to the law, not because he was free of prejudice personally. To ensure the book would sell, her publisher suggested she rewrite the manuscript to enthrone Atticus as totally dedicated to black rights and integration. Lee capitulated, and Mockingbird sold 40 million copies and was the subject of a highly successful film featuring Gregory Peck as Atticus.

Why Lee felt Watchman — and its contradictions – should be published 60 years later could have been a desire to earn money. Or others around her may have conspired to put her name on a bogus manuscript. However, it is plausible that she approved Watchman because of the guilt she felt as she neared the end of her life; that the real truth about Atticus had to be aired before she met her maker. After all, Mockingbird is listed in most school and college syllabi as historical truth, perhaps the most widely read account of the Jim Crow South by whites, as well as blacks.

Lee’s conscience is on display in Watchman, not her publisher’s idealized Atticus Finch in Mockingbird. The real hero, it turns out, is Harper Lee herself for the courage to contradict the idealistic, concocted charade of her legacy and have Go Set A Watchman published. Southerners understand what it takes to be truthful about race.