Diane McWhorter, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the Birmingham campaign, asserts that To Kill a Mockingbird condemns racism instead of racists, and states that every child in the South has moments of racial cognitive dissonance when they are faced with the harsh reality of inequality. This feeling causes them to question the beliefs with which they have been raised, which for many children is what the novel does. McWhorter writes of Lee, "for a white person from the South to write a book like this in the late 1950s is really unusual—by its very existence an act of protest."Murphy, pp. 141–146.McWhorter went to school with Mary Badham, the actor who portrayed Scout in the film adaptation. (Murphy, p. 141) Author James McBride calls Lee brilliant but stops short of calling her brave:
