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Narrated by Xe Sands
Diane McWhorterUnabridged — 28 hours, 46 minutes
Narrated by Xe Sands
Diane McWhorterUnabridged — 28 hours, 46 minutes
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This is a big important book, a challenging portrait of an American city at the center of the most significant domestic drama of the 20th century.
— Newsweek
The story of civil rights in Birmingham, Ala., has been told before from the unspeakable violence to the simple, courageous decencies but fresh, sometimes startling details distinguish this doorstop page-turner told by a daughter of the city's white elite. McWhorter, a regular New York Times contributor, focuses on two shattering moments in Birmingham in 1963 that led to "the end of apartheid in America": when "Bull Connor's police dogs and fire hoses" attacked "school age witnesses for justice," and when the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Church, killing four black girls. Yet she brings a gripping pace and an unusual, two-fold perspective to her account, incorporating her viewpoint as a child (she was largely ignorant of what was going on "downtown," even as her father took an increasingly active role in opposing the civil rights movement), as well as her adult viewpoint as an avid scholar and journalist. Surveying figures both major and minor civil rights leaders, politicians, clergy, political organizers of all stripes her panoramic study unmasks prominent members of Birmingham in collusion with the Klan, revealing behind-the-scenes machinations of "terrorists on the payroll at U.S. Steel" and men like Sid Smyer, McWhorter's distant cousin, who "bankrolled... one of the city's most rabid klansmen." McWhorter binds it all together with the strong thread of a family saga, fueled by a passion to understand the father about whom she had long harbored "vague but sinister visions" and other men of his class and clan. (Mar. 15) Forecast: McWhorter's prominence and her willingness to name names as well as her exhaustive research and skillful narrative virtually guarantee major review attention. Bolstered by an eight-city tour and a pre-pub excerpt in Talk in February, the 50,000-copy first printing should move fast. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Journalist McWhorter (the New York Times) offers a three-part chronicle of Birmingham, AL, the crucial battleground of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. A daughter of privilege, she puts her homefolk's resistance to black civil rights in a national context. But her signal contribution is her account of life inside Fortress Segregation. She reveals the intimate workings and absolutism of segregation, which she dubs "a civilization more peculiar than slavery." Her detailed portrait of white intransigence and retaliation climaxes in 1963 with Police Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor's dogs and the September 15 dynamiting that killed four black girls at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. McWhorter's literate, often barbed, well-referenced local history with a family twist is a feat of reporting that belongs alongside David Halberstam's The Children (LJ 2/15/98), Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 (LJ 1/89. o.p.), and such works on Birmingham as John Walton Cotman's Birmingham, JFK, and the Civil Rights Act of 1963 (1989). Recommended for all collections on civil rights and U.S. or Southern history. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/00.] Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
From a journalist and member of one of Birmingham's leading families, a vivid, admirably nuanced, and wide-ranging history of the city that became ground zero in the Civil Rights struggle as black children marched, the white establishment wrestled with the need to change, and the Ku Klux Klan engaged in murderous bombings. Founded only in 1871, Birmingham rapidly became a dynamic industrial center, but this city of "perpetual promise" saw its share of hard times. These in turn led to strong unions, a resentful white underclass, alienated blacks, and a white elite imbued with a company-town ethos. By the late 1950s, as the demand for American steel declined, growing unemployment led to a rebirth of the Klan. Already suspicious of outsiders-in the 1930s communists were active in the unions and the emerging civil-rights organizations-the white city fathers (with Bull Connor in charge) were determined to resist the demands for integration. Like George Wallace, they believed that segregation was forever. McWhorter describes all the significant events and the relevant players: men like Fred Shuttleworth, the Baptist minister who initiated peaceful black mass action in the city only to be supplanted by Martin Luther King (who wrote his seminal "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" while imprisoned there in 1963); George Wallace, who disavowed his liberal beliefs for the sake of political power; the Kennedys, trying desperately to contain the conflagrations; as well as bit players like Sam Smyer, a racist city leader who understood that photos of police dogs attacking children harmed the city and began to work for change; and Elizabeth Hood Cobb, who gave the police information about heruncle'sinvolvement in the bombing of the church in which four black girls were killed. The author ends her account with new information about the bombings. A dense, detailed, and insightful history. First serial to Talk Magazine; first printing of 50,000; author tour
Winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction
Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize
Winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award
One of Time Magazine’s All-Time 100 Nonfiction Books since 1923
“Best Books” List: New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Chicago Tribune, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, American Heritage
A big, important book, a challenging portrait of an American city at the center of the most significant domestic drama of the twentieth century."
The most important book on the movement since Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters."
This epic of reportage and history about Birmingham, Alabama, in the early'60s reads like a big ambitious novel. . . . McWhorter's complex narrative roves skillfully forward and backward . . . the cast is huge and vivid, the story brimming with courage, drama, villains and heroes. The War and Peace of the civil right movement.
"An exhaustive journey through both the segregationist and integrationist sides of Birmingham's struggle . . . [McWhorter] contributes significantly to the historical record."
A tour de force, comparable in importance to J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground and Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters. Carry Me Home is destined to become a classic in the history of the civil rights movement."
"McWhorter's own involvement in the story . . . reenergizes the struggle, serving as a reminder that history is always personal."
A big, important book, a challenging portrait of an American city at the center of the most significant domestic drama of the twentieth century."
"McWhorter's own involvement in the story . . . reenergizes the struggle, serving as a reminder that history is always personal."
Winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction
Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize
Winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award
One of Time Magazine’s All-Time 100 Nonfiction Books since 1923
“Best Books” List: New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Chicago Tribune, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, American Heritage
Winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction
Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize
Winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award
One of Time Magazine’s All-Time 100 Nonfiction Books since 1923
“Best Books” List: New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Chicago Tribune, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, American Heritage
“A tour de force, comparable in importance to J. Anthony Lukas's Common Ground and Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters. Carry Me Home is destined to become a classic in the history of the civil rights movement."
"An exhaustive journey through both the segregationist and integrationist sides of Birmingham's struggle . . . [McWhorter] contributes significantly to the historical record."
“A big, important book, a challenging portrait of an American city at the center of the most significant domestic drama of the twentieth century."
"McWhorter's own involvement in the story . . . reenergizes the struggle, serving as a reminder that history is always personal."
“This epic of reportage and history about Birmingham, Alabama, in the early'60s reads like a big ambitious novel. . . . McWhorter's complex narrative roves skillfully forward and backward . . . the cast is huge and vivid, the story brimming with courage, drama, villains and heroes. The War and Peace of the civil right movement.”
“The most important book on the movement since Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters."
| BN ID: | 2940176050004 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tantor Audio |
| Publication date: | 02/23/2021 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
from Chapter 8: Pivot
The Colored Guests
The chasm between blacks and whites in Birmingham had never seemed wider, even as the city's ruling white men were breaking their first racial taboo to sit down with Negroes, almost man to man. The controversy that was making integrationists of segregation's former custodians had barely registered in the black community. The imminent closing of the parks was "a minor problem," a black spokesman told the Wall Street Journal, compared to the whites-only lunch counters and the police department. "We will not miss what we have never had," ACMHR vice president Ed Gardner pointed out. When Fred Shuttlesworth and the Movement's security chief, the barber James Armstrong, had showed up at the all-white public golf course in the fall of 1959 to set up the constitutional test to integrate the parks, they had had to borrow golf clubs and were happy to have been arrested before revealing their ignorance of how to swing them.
Shuttlesworth's attitude toward the white country clubbers trying to save parks they wouldn't deign to use was condescension: "They just don't all of a sudden love us, but let's pretend that they do and maybe it will come to be." The World editor, Emory O. Jackson, actively resented them. In a foul humor, he reported to Sid Smyer's integrated meeting on December 21, in the study of the Episcopal bishop at the Church of the Advent downtown (which had been the Interracial Committee's old haven). There were thirty-eight men at this one, including the Reverends J. L. Ware and Herb Oliver, and, on the white side, News publisher Clarence Hanson, Birmingham-Southern College's liberal president Henry King Stanford, and Jim Head, who felt that the only thing that could be said for Smyer's previous meetings on the parks issue was that they took place at all, and under Chamber of Commerce auspices.
Before this one, Head had gone to the chambers of Judge Hobart Grooms, a friend of his and a fellow Big Baptist in a town dominated by Methodists. Grooms had agreed to grant a sixty-day stay, similar to the plan approved by the federal court in Memphis, during which the parks could remain open on a segregated basis. Smyer's opening speech at the December 21 meeting solicited the black men's opinion of the plan.
The "colored guests," as Herb Oliver viewed them, spoke noncommittally of the need to "go forward," until the Reverend C. E. Thomas, bishop of the C.M.E. Church (and a former Interracial Committee member), offered some sharp words about the newspapers' coverage of racial matters. After feebly defending the News, Clarence Hanson left the meeting early with another white "host" — to play golf. Emory Jackson took the opportunity to huff out, in protest of the meeting's being declared off the record — which did not prevent him from announcing to his World readers that the Big Boys, as he called his black establishment peers, were "selling them down the river."
Miles College's talented new president, Lucius Pitts, recognized the territorial Jackson's rants for what they were: a gauntlet thrown down at him to justify his presumption to speak for Birmingham's blacks. The parks meetings had been Pitts's first venture as a "Negro leader" willing to do business with white folks. He responded to Jackson's challenge by nudging the Movement into its next stage.
"Demonstrations"
Until recently, the word "demonstrations" had an anachronistic Old Left ring. Demonstrations had been the pride of the Communists in the thirties and the last refuge of the fifties' anti-nuke pacifists, but they had not been mustered by the modern civil rights movement until the spring of 1960, when the militant youths of Nashville led a mass march downtown that froze white onlookers into a glacier of fear and awe. Confronted softly at the end of the demonstration by Diane Nash, the moderate mayor, Ben West, admitted that it was not "morally right for someone to sell 'em merchandise and refuse 'em service," and he had desegregated his city's lunch counters.
In the past couple of months, demonstrations had joined the canon of modern liberation art. In Albany, a pecan and cotton center in southwest Georgia ("the tenth fastest booming city in the U.S.A.") that the locals called Al-BIN-ee, a scrappy SNCC field secretary named Charles Sherrod, veteran of sit-ins and Freedom Rides, had ignited the broadest-based community campaign since the Montgomery bus boycott five years earlier. A hotheaded twenty-two-year-old Baptist minister who had grown up on a squalid street in Petersburg, Virginia, Sherrod had staged the first Albany sit-in at the Trailways white waiting room on November 1, the day that the new Interstate Commerce Commission ruling desegregating bus and train facilities in response to Robert Kennedy's petition went into effect. Soon after, in spectacular defiance of legendary black factionalism (as well as of the "massah" tradition bred by the nearby hunting retreats — "plantations" — of industrialists such as Coca-Cola's Robert Woodruff), the entire local black community, from the NAACP, to the Federation of Women's Clubs, to the ministerial alliances, banded together as the Albany Movement. Its goal was to stamp out segregation — not simply seating on buses or at lunch counters but, for the first time, the entire system.
The Albany Movement had gone demonstration crazy since spontaneously enacting, in late November, the first major demonstration after Nashville. There had been so many arrests that the Movement for the first time had a real shot at the Gandhian goal of filling the jails. Albany became a new civil rights mecca. SNCC was sending pilgrims there, and on the weekend of December 16 came "de Lawd" himself. Martin Luther King was arrested along with Ralph Abernathy, who had just moved to Atlanta to take over a church there at King's urging. Abernathy bailed out the night of his arrest in order to be back at his church in time to introduce his Men's Day speaker, Fred Shuttlesworth, but King vowed to spend Christmas in jail.
Albany now had a world-class martyr, and the news coverage to match. The campaign seemed to be soaring into history, as the Movement's long-awaited follow-up to the Montgomery bus boycott. But after less than two days in jail, King changed his mind and bailed out. The Albany Movement went into a tailspin of sectarian recrimination, with SNCC furious at SCLC's Wyatt Walker for trying to take command of their fight, in his crisp field marshal fashion. The news media, which hadn't really had the vocabulary to cover a sustained grassroots protest, now played the story not as one of black against white, but of black against black: "Rivalries Beset Integration Campaign," read the New York Times headline. Albany was "one of the most stunning defeats" of King's career, according to the New York Herald Tribune, "a devastating loss of face."
Somehow the story always came back to King, but strategic miscues had also hampered the Albany campaign. The protesters had aimed their demands at city hall, essentially asking elected officials to commit political suicide by abolishing segregation. In Birmingham, where Bull Connor was jailing the Greyhound station manager for desegregating his cafe in compliance with the ICC ruling, the Movement was realizing that it was time to stop fighting city hall. The activists had decided to take advantage of their new "friendship" with the city fathers since the parks misfortune and apply pressure to white men who were motivated not by politics per se but (as their embarrassment over the Freedom Rides had proved) by the economic consequences of "bad" politics.
By December, the new Miles College contingent of the Movement — President Lucius Pitts as well as Frank Dukes and his classmates — was ready to move beyond politics and take on the real power, as Bob Zellner had discovered the previous month. He had arrived in Birmingham hoping that his grandfather, an unregenerate local Klan racist who had disowned Bob's "nigger-loving" father, wouldn't find out he was there. Zellner had become SNCC's first white field secretary not long after the Freedom Rides capped off his education at Huntingdon College. The person who had recruited him was Anne Braden, of the Southern Conference Educational Fund, which had close ties to the student movement. It was SCEF that paid Zellner his modest salary, to carry on the old Southern Conference mandate as the SNCC staff member designated to proselytize white students. So far, however, Zellner had been busy bonding with his black comrades. On the steps of the courthouse in McComb, Mississippi, where SNCC was conducting a voter registration campaign, he had recently been choked by white men, gouged in the eyes, and kicked in the face, and then, still clutching his Bible, hauled off to jail. That baptism had made him a SNCC legend by the time he showed up in Birmingham and headed for Miles College to see if he could be of assistance.
Though they received him politely, Frank Dukes and his classmates were eager to avoid any appearance of being "agitated by outsiders." Zellner respected their concerns and unofficially helped Dukes and his lieutenants draft a statement, "This We Believe," whose dignified wording hardly disguised its radical intent: "We do not intend to wait complacently for those rights which are legally and morally ours to be meted out to us one at a time." Forming an Anti-Injustice Committee, the students began conducting a quiet investigation of local department stores. For a "school project," Dukes got figures from the unsuspecting Chamber of Commerce. The stores, he learned, operated on a 12 to 15 percent profit margin. "Negro dollars" made up 25 percent of the gross, or $4 million in an average week. This meant that cutting black business by half could tip the balance into the red. They began discussing a boycott that would paralyze the city's retail trade.
By chance, Sid Smyer's historic biracial meetings had suddenly put the Miles College president, Lucius Pitts, in a position to get his students' message across. Pitts was a crafty man. During the parks "talks," he had been reasonable without being subservient. He was the type of black man who made whites — liberals like Head, conservatives like Smyer — feel comfortable. And Pitts had plans for their budding "friendship." He knew that intimations of a department store boycott alone would fall under the "empty threat" category of what J. L. Ware called "little nigger causes." For a boycott to succeed, there would also have to be demonstrations — a presence of Negroes to offset their boycotting absence — to trigger a white person's worst nightmare of rampaging black people. This would incite a secondary boycott by white customers wanting to stay away from potential violence.
Fred Shuttlesworth had never proposed demonstrations for his town because he knew he had neither the troops nor the support of the middle class. And in truth, Pitts was hardly counting on actual demonstrations; the white folks merely had to think that they were going to happen. He began "tipping off" his new white acquaintances that he was trying to maintain order but didn't know how long he was going to be able to keep the Shuttlesworth crowd off the streets — massive demonstrations, you know.
"Niggers at the Krystal"
Now that the Klan's old sponsors were joining forces with their former common enemy to phase out segregation, the vigilantes turned desperate to guard their diminishing domain. As if to restore the authority of the DeBardelebens to the enterprise, Troy Ingram had recently returned to the Klan fold; and when he did he was welcomed into the highest Imperial councils. He was the new old face in the usual lineup of bored husbands at the United Klans' November meeting of the North Alabama Province. The Eastview rank and file had grown fidgety, basically having done nothing since the Freedom Rides. Exalted Cyclops Robert Thomas seemed to be losing control of the klavern. Rather than giving or withholding approval for the "missionary work," he would say he didn't want to hear about it one way or the other.
When Klansman Al Peek had left a recent Thursday Eastview meeting to go get a sack of burgers down the street at the Krystal Kitchen, he had gotten so upset at the sight of "niggers at the Krystal" that he had barely been able to spit out the password for the Night Hawk to let him back in. On the first Saturday in December, Eastview's all-stars, including Gene Reeves and Tommy Rowe, teamed up with some rookies to defend the klavern's unofficial mess hall. The Krystal was crowded when they arrived. One of Troy Ingram's new recruits, from the old DeBardeleben precincts, was so hepped up by all the "nigger" talk — brainwashed, he later said — that when a black customer stood beside him, he cocked his fist and knocked "hell out of him." Another novice, Buddy Galyean, considered "mentally deficient" by one of his ex-employers, hit him with brass knuckles, according to Rowe's report to the FBI, and knocked out his eye. As the veteran Klansmen piled on, two football players from Woodlawn High School and another white man, Rodney Cooper, came to the victim's aid. The senior Klansman in the group, Gene Reeves, who had been one of the select Klansmen on the Freedom Rides detail, wrestled the white defenders out onto the sidewalk. Tommy Rowe swung at anyone handy.
Policemen appeared in the parking lot and arrested a bystander who had been "acting like a bantam rooster," according to Ingram's recruit, "doing a lot of crowing but no fighting." The police department's continuing sympathy with the Klan was perhaps a function of sentimental reflex, now that the stakes of the collaboration had degenerated from the industrial economy of a great workshop town to a ten-cent hamburger.
Copyright © 2001 by Diane McWhorter
To mark Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, a list of essential reading to remember and celebrate the movement he championed.
