You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America

by Paul Kix

Overview

From journalist Paul Kix, the riveting story, never before fully told, of the 1963 Birmingham Campaign—ten weeks that would shape the course of the Civil Rights Movement and the future of America.

It’s one of the iconic photographs of American history: A Black teenager, a policeman and his lunging German Shepherd. Birmingham, Alabama, May of 1963. In May of 2020, as reporter Paul Kix stared at a different photo–that of a Minneapolis police officer suffocating George Floyd–he kept returning to the other photo taken half a century earlier, haunted by its echoes. What, Kix wondered, was the full legacy of the Birmingham photo? And of the campaign it stemmed from?

In You Have To Be Prepared To Die Before You Can Begin To Live, Paul Kix takes the reader behind the scenes as he tells the story of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s pivotal 10 week campaign in 1963 to end segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. At the same time, he also provides a window into the minds of the four extraordinary men who led the campaign—Martin Luther King, Jr., Wyatt Walker, Fred Shuttlesworth, and James Bevel. With page-turning prose that read like a thriller, Kix’s book is the first to zero in on the ten weeks of Project C, as it was known—its specific history and its echoes sounding throughout our culture now. It’s about Where It All Began, for sure, but it’s also the key to understanding Where We Are Now and Where We Will Be. As the fight for equality continues on many fronts, Project C is crucial to our understanding of our own time and the impact that strategic activism can have.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250807694
Publisher:	Celadon Books
Publication date:	05/02/2023
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	105,472
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Paul Kix is an author and writer whose last book was The Saboteur, a bestselling and critically acclaimed true story of the most daring man in World War II. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, GQ, and ESPN The Magazine, among other publications. He lives in Connecticut with his family.

Editorial Reviews

★ 02/20/2023

Journalist Kix (The Saboteur) delivers a gripping, novelistic account of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s campaign to desegregate Birmingham, Ala., in 1963. The brainchild of the group’s executive director, Wyatt Walker, the idea was to use public safety commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor’s “virulent” racism against him: through a four-step process of escalation, Walker hoped to push Connor into unleashing his “terrible vengeance” on the SCLC, “which would give the waiting press corps all the gory copy they needed” and bring thousands more protestors to Birmingham, forcing local officials to “broker a fairer and more equitable future.” In brisk, tension-filled chapters, Kix recounts the crusade’s ups and downs and draws vivid profiles of participants including pastor Fred Shuttlesworth, whose bravery and intimate knowledge of the city proved vital, and SCLC director of direct action James Bevel, whose controversial push to recruit children and teenagers to join the protests resulted in the most horrifying—and effective—news coverage. Eschewing rose-colored reminiscences in favor of knotty reckonings with the SCLC’s internal rivalries, supercharged egos, and “‘endless’ deliberation,” Kix makes a persuasive case that Birmingham saved a floundering organization and galvanized the Kennedy administration to commit to civil rights. Readers will be riveted from the first page to the last. (May)

Publishers Weekly

Through the careful accretion of intimate detail, Paul Kix makes a convincing case that Birmingham 1963 was the linchpin of the civil rights era and perhaps the most consequential ten-week period in modern American history. His portraits of the Birmingham saga's many heroes (sung and unsung) are poignant, revealing, and finely drawn."
–Hampton Sides, New York Times bestselling author of Hellhound on His Trail

"Journalist Kix delivers a gripping, novelistic account of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s campaign to desegregate Birmingham, Ala., in 1963… Readers will be riveted from the first page to the last."
–Publishers Weekly, starred review

"An eloquent contribution to the literature of civil rights and the ceaseless struggle to attain them."
–Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Journalist Kix masterfully follows the story of the protests, from the early planning stages through the demonstrations and city officials’ violent responses... A meticulously written and researched history in all its complexity.”
—Library Journal, starred review

"You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live walks us, in profound detail, through the long days and nights that would lead to the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. It offers specifics of heroism never before or rarely enough told. And it unpacks, without sensation, opportunities disrupted so that our generation may learn, and in learning, claim our own for our role in the bending of that storied moral arc. For we who count ourselves among those specific numbers, join me in welcoming, gratefully, Paul Kix’s brilliantly documented and beautifully rendered testimony, a life-giving offering to his children. And mine. And yours."
–asha bandele, New York Times bestselling author, activist, and poet

"This is the story of the ten weeks that gave America the 'Letter from the Birmingham Jail,' a tight, powerful, emotional history that seemed to alter our nation forever; and at the same time, this narrative is its own letter from a jail, the existential one of a man raising Black children in modern America. This is a letter, and a poem, and a prayer, and in the end, a map: a document that takes us into a dark past to show us all the way back into the light."
–Wright Thompson, New York Times bestselling author of The Cost of These Dreams and Pappyland

"A great book, and it could not be timelier, as America continues to grapple with the transgenerational consequences of racism on our society. Paul Kix combines meticulous research with masterful storytelling to present vivid behind-the-scenes insights into the people, passions, and politics that propelled the ten-week 1963 Birmingham campaign into a civil rights milestone. With both sweep and arresting detail, this page-turner illuminates the human complexities, fears, frailties, and inner workings of iconic leaders and their organizations along with the strategies behind the signs, slogans, and sound bites that changed American life forever. You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live is a must-read for every student of history."
–Stacey Patton, author of Spare the Kids

From the Publisher

★ 04/01/2023

By 1963, the civil rights movement had not had a significant victory since the Montgomery bus boycotts in the 1950s. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference set their sights on Birmingham, AL, to force an end to segregation in the city. Out of these protests, some of the most harrowing and iconic images of that movement emerged: young teens viciously attacked by police dogs and brutally knocked down by high-pressure fire hoses. Journalist Kix (The Saboteur) masterfully follows the story of the protests, from the early planning stages through the demonstrations and city officials' violent responses. Kix expertly lays bare the tensions among various groups involved, including the city's business leaders, the decision to allow children to march, the indecisiveness and President Kennedy's concern with maintaining Southern allegiance, and the fight between Bull Connor and Albert Boutwell over who ran Birmingham. This is a meticulously written and researched history in all its complexity. VERDICT Focused exclusively on the 10-week civil rights campaign in Birmingham, AL, this essential book will appeal to readers interested in American civil rights history and the 1960s.—Chad E. Statler

Library Journal

★ 2023-02-23
Thoroughgoing study of the civil rights movement as it played out on a critical Alabama battlefield.

Though founded after the Civil War, in 1871, Birmingham was a center of neo-Confederate revanchism. “These people are vicious,” said one police officer at the time, referring to those “who could be the Klan.” As historian Kix notes, the city was poor, dangerous, polluted, and marked by one of the lowest literacy rates in the nation. Its infamous sheriff, Bull Connor, “was never quite the disease of Birmingham but a symptom,” a high school dropout who shrewdly realized, after working dead-end jobs, that “a hatred of Blacks and drawn-out populism toward whites could propel a political rise.” Pit the violent, autocratic Connor against nonviolent Martin Luther King Jr., and the outcome seems almost foreordained—except that King’s nonviolence and the savagery of Connor’s policing, evidenced most plainly by an infamous photograph showing a Black teenager being mauled by a police dog, led to nationwide sympathy for the civil rights marchers. They also finally got John and Robert Kennedy, hitherto indifferent to the Black struggle for equality, off the fence to bring about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the beginning step in dismantling desegregation. All that didn’t stop Connor, whose deputies arrested 973 children in a single demonstration, but again, “the piercing screams of the children” created nothing but sympathy. Kix’s vivid and often maddening account of police brutality, ignorant racism, and the power of misguided ideas makes for sobering reading. Of course, the struggle for civil rights continues, but Birmingham wrought meaningful results: the ability of the author, for example, to marry a Black woman, expanded voter rights, and more, including King’s world-changing “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” Even so, writes the author, “America has always been home to both hope and hate,” and the latter always persists.

An eloquent contribution to the literature of civil rights and the ceaseless struggle to attain them.

Kirkus Reviews

This audiobook perfectly captures the extraordinary Project C, the ten- week campaign to end segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, which was crucial to the subsequent success of the 1963 March on Washington. Jaime Lincoln-Smith's performance is exceptional. He complements the book's historical precision with his delivery of the memorable voice of Martin Luther King, Jr., while also creating personas for the other leaders who conceived and orchestrated the protest. Lincoln-Smith employs the staccato delivery of a newscaster to tell the central story. He mixes in precise tones and a range of emotions that enhance this previously untold chronicle of the Civil Rights movement. This memorable book is crucial to understanding the events of that era and how collective activism can lead to necessary change. D.J.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

SEPTEMBER 2023 - AudioFile