You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: 10 Weeks in Birmingham that Changed America
Paul Kix (2023, Celadon Books)
When you think of Birmingham in the spring of 1963, perhaps you recall a striking photograph: a policeman has 15-year-old Walter Gadsden’s shirt in one hand, and the leash of a police dog in the other. Gadsden looks weirdly peaceful for someone whose flesh is about to be torn by snarling teeth. “Despite the ferocity of the assault, his body was relaxed and erect. His arms remained at his side…It was as if he were giving himself to the German shepherd–and to posterity.” The picture appeared across three columns of the New York Times’s front page, and in papers around the world, where it took the Birmingham civil rights protests to a new level of national urgency.
Paul Kix turns his fascination with that picture to the story of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and how the SCLC decided to go to Birmingham and challenge the beast in its own lair. A white man with a Black wife and children, he has some skin in this game. He narrows his focus to ten weeks of that spring, and perhaps a dozen consequential characters, so that he can turn history back into a story. It’s a gift for his sons and daughter, to fortify them against the horror and despair that keep entering their home through the television set.
We begin in January of 1963, at a secret meeting of the inner circle of the SCLC. Wyatt Walker, the group’s executive director, handed out an eight-page plan for “a campaign unlike any other. ‘I call it Project X,’ Walker said. Because X marked the spot of confrontation.” Walker had Martin Luther King's trust, and his backing. Everyone present was well aware of what a run of failure the SCLC had been experiencing, particularly in the previous year’s miserable Albany campaign. Albany’s police chief, Laurie Pritchett, had rendered the SCLC’s protests ineffective by using non-violence of his own, arresting people gently and courteously.
In going to Birmingham, Walker was making a very reasonable bet that Bull Connor would not do likewise. As Commissioner of Public Safety, Connor had a well-deserved reputation for making Birmingham’s Black residents far less safe, at any sign of their trying to exercise basic rights. And so it would prove, though Wyatt’s careful blueprint relied on some assumptions that didn’t exactly hold up, such as how many marchers he could attract through King’s oratory. James Bevel, who had been part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Nashville sit-ins in 1960, regarded this plan as another example of an arrogant SCLC parachuting in and dictating what local people could or would do, and it was this, Bevel thought, that had led to all those failures.
As it happened, later that spring, it was Bevel who found the marchers who made the difference: teenagers, who weren’t putting their jobs and their families’ livelihoods at risk, as adults would have done. Bevel led training in non-violence, as he had in Nashville. He devised ways of spreading word of plans, including finding a DJ who could work coded instructions into his radio patter between R&B hits. In a short time, there were thousands of young marchers, whom Bevel could send out of the 16th Street Baptist Church in organized squads. So many were arrested that some were housed in animal pens at the state fairgrounds; uncomfortable and frightening, to be sure, but also a sign that they were winning, because the jails were full and the world was noticing.
Two of the most consequential events of that spring actually took place in New York City. The first was a March 31st fundraiser hosted by Harry Belafonte at his palatial apartment on West End Avenue, where wealthy and influential New Yorkers were attracted by the chance to find out what Martin Luther King, Jr., would do next. They wound up ‘investing’ some $475,000 for expenses and bail money.
The second was on May 24th, at an apartment on Central Park South, which belonged to Joseph Kennedy. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy was trying to shape the government’s response to the crisis developing in Birmingham, and he called James Baldwin(!) to ask for a secret conversation with Black leaders. He got more than he bargained for, in anger and in hard truths; after some reflection, it caused him to go to bat for what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Kix makes use of the whole range of sources we have now, after sixty years of study; not just Bearing the Cross, David Garrow’s history of the SCLC, and Carry Me Home, Diane McWhorter’s magnificent book on Birmingham, but memoirs and biographies of Harry Belafonte, Robert Kennedy, Fred Shuttlesworth, and many others. And so on: newspaper files, oral history interviews, and FBI dossiers. But that’s all end notes, which would serve admirably as the syllabus for a class on the civil rights movement.
Don’t worry about that, unless you want to. Read it for the story.
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