March 09, 2023 | by Sam Hodges
Alice Finch Lee may be a footnote in literary history as the older sister of Harper Lee, author of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
But in United Methodist circles, she’s being remembered as an exemplary laywoman whose service and wise counsel stretched across decades, and could be felt at the local church, conference and general church levels.
“She really was a pillar of leadership,” said Dawn Wiggins Hare, a close friend of Lee’s, fellow resident of Monroeville, Ala., and top executive of the United Methodist Commission on the Status and Role of Women.
Lee, 103, died Monday in Monroeville. Funeral arrangements are pending, said the Rev. Francis Turner III, pastor of First United Methodist Church in Monroeville.
Survivors include her sister Harper, 88, who lives in a Monroeville assisted living home.
Harper Lee dedicated “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a 1961 Pulitzer Prize-winner and one of the best-selling novels of all-time, to Alice Lee and to their father.
The novel’s hero, a lawyer who risks his life to defend a black man falsely accused of rape in Depression-era Alabama, is named Atticus Finch.
Alice Finch Lee was a female legal pioneer in south Alabama, practicing law in Monroeville from 1944 until she was nearly 100, and earning a reputation for unassailable integrity.
“She is Atticus in a skirt,” said the Rev. Thomas Butts, pastor emeritus of First United Methodist Church in Monroeville, in introducing her for an award given her by the Alabama Bar Association in 2003.
Reached by phone Tuesday, Butts said Lee’s death would leave a void in Monroeville, First United Methodist Church of Monroeville and in The United Methodist Church.
Butts said Lee was asked once what positions she’d held in her local church.
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