Alice Finch Lee (September 11, 1911 – November 17, 2014) was an American lawyer and lay leader in the United Methodist Church. One of the first female lawyers in Alabama, she was the sister of author Harper Lee and helped her manage publicity requests. Due to her life's work and sister, she was described as "Atticus Finch in a skirt."
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Biography
Alice Finch Lee was born on September 11, 1911, in Bonifay, Florida to Amasa and Frances Finch Lee. She was the eldest of the Lee children. Her sister, Nelle Harper Lee, was fifteen years her junior. Lee attended Monroe County High School, graduating at sixteen. She attended Huntingdon College between 1928 and 1929, returning after a year due to the Great Depression and her father's purchase of a local newspaper. She worked for the paper, The Monroe Journal, until 1937, when she moved to Birmingham to work for the Social Security division of the Internal Revenue Service. Two years later, she enrolled in the Birmingham School of Law.
Lee passed the bar in 1943, becoming one of Alabama's first female lawyers. The next year, she returned to Monroeville, where she joined her father's law firm in general practice. She also served on the board of directors and as attorney for the Monroe County Bank.
Lee continued to make strides in the local public and religious fields. She was the first woman to serve on the Monroeville City Planning Commission, the first woman to chair the West Florida Council on Ministries in the Methodist Church, the first woman to chair the board of directors of the United Methodist Children's Home, and a charter member of the Alabama/West Florida United Methodist Foundation board of directors. In the mid-1960s, she became the "hero of the conference" at an annual Alabama West-Florida Annual Conference meeting, when she used a parliamentary maneuver to prevent efforts to block a report recognizing the present racial divisions.