You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live

December 1, 2022

Looking at footage of George Floyd's death, Black journalist Kix was reminded of the famous image taken in 1963 in Birmingham, AL, showing a white policeman whose dog is leaping ferociously at a Black teenager. That made him ponder the consequences of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's 10-week campaign in 1963 to end segregation in Birmingham, the most segregated city in United States. With a 60,000-copy first printing.

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Starred review from February 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.

Starred review from April 1, 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

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 15, 2023
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.

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