YOU HAVE TO BE PREPARED TO DIE BEFORE YOU CAN BEGIN TO LIVE

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.