You have to be prepared to die before you can begin to live Ten weeks in Birmingham that changed America

Paul Kix

Book - 2023

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.

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  • Prologue
  • Part I. Genesis
  • 1. A Point That Everyone Should Consider Carefully
  • 2. "This Is Not Getting Any Better"
  • 3. What It Takes to Begin to Live
  • 4. What Was Promising and Impossible
  • Part II. Project Confrontation
  • 5. Departures
  • 6. Arrival
  • 7. It Begins
  • 8. Who Will Rise from the Pews?
  • 9. Explanations and Accusations
  • 10. Optics, Optics, Optics
  • 11. "I've Got It!"
  • Part III. The Good Friday Test
  • 12. "… The Righteous Are Bold as a Lion"
  • 13. When Bull Said No to All That
  • 14. The Counter to the Countermove
  • 15. Upping the Stakes
  • 16. The Garden of Gethsemane
  • 17. The Good Friday Test
  • 18. "Why Have You Forsaken Me?"
  • Part IV. The Writing on Scraps of Newsprint
  • 19. The Hole
  • 20. Who Cares About Prison Reform Now?
  • 21. "This Will Be One of the Most Historic Documents. …
  • Part V. "… And a Child Shall Lead Them"
  • 22. The Prophet Returns with His Wife
  • 23. Emergence
  • 24. The Indecent Proposal
  • 25. The Prophet and the Playboy
  • 26. The End of the "Endless" Deliberation
  • Part VI. D-Day and Beyond
  • 27. D-Day
  • 28. Double D-Day
  • 29. The View from Washington
  • 30. Burke Goes to Birmingham
  • 31. How Not to Negotiate with the King
  • 32. And Lo, the Pharoah Shall Weep
  • 33. Marshall's Interpretation
  • 34. Unintended Outcomes
  • 35. "Martin, This Is It!"
  • 36. "Put Some Water on the Reverend"
  • 37. This Time, Something New
  • 38. Wishful Thinking?
  • 39. The Seats at the Table
  • 40. The Betrayal
  • 41. The Unraveling
  • 42. The Younger Brother's Complex
  • 43. "What I'm About to Tell You Will Not Be Repeated"
  • 44. Wrestling with Its Conscience
  • Part VII. "But for Birmingham …"
  • 45. "This Whole Town Has Gone Berserk"
  • 46. Shaping the Postscript
  • 47. Considering the Impossible
  • 48. The Gathering at 24 Central Park South
  • 49. God's Beneficence
  • 50. The Brother's Message
  • 51. The Speech
  • 52. "But for Birmingham …"
  • Epilogue
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Index
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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)

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Review by Library Journal Review

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

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.