Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution

by Diane McWhorter, Xe Sands (Narrator)

"The Year of Birmingham," 1963, was a cataclysmic turning point in America's long civil rights struggle. That spring, child demonstrators faced down police dogs and fire hoses in huge nonviolent marches for desegregation. A few months later, Ku Klux Klansmen retaliated by bombing the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and killing four young black girls. Diane McWhorter, journalist and daughter of a prominent Birmingham family, weaves together police and FBI documents, interviews with black activists and former Klansmen, and personal memories into an extraordinary narrative of the city, the personalities, and the events that brought about America's second emancipation.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Race, American History, Politics, Social Justice, Historical

Audiobook

First published March 15, 2001

Reviews

[Teri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carry Me Home is a thorough account of the history of the fight for civil rights in Birmingham, Alabama. McWhorter gives detailed background on the politics behind segregationist groups, Dixiecrats, and the Freedom Movement. Also covered are the Freedom Rides, local marches led by Martin Luther King and Fred Shuttlesworth, and the various bombings in the area, culminating with the bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church that killed four young girls during Sunday School. McWhorter wraps up with a follow up on what happened to the major players, and the trials of the two remaining bombers that led to their convictions. Interspersed throughout the book are the author's own recollections of these years and the part her father may or may not have played in any nefarious acts.

This was a very good book and worthy of its Pulitzer Prize. It was exhaustive and is very dense but very much worth the read. It definitely takes you to that time and helps the reader to understand the climate and tense atmosphere of Birmingham, Alabama from the early 40s through the 60s and beyond.

[Frances · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the hardest, most informative book I have ever read. It took me almost three months to read. I live in Birmingham and was eight years old when the church was bombed. My grandparents owned a grocery store on 15th street and 8th Avenue, just a few blocks away. Today I am 63 and I volunteer at the Birmingham public library in the heart of the civil rights historical area. Phillips high school where Fred Shuttlesworth was brutally beaten is just a few blocks away. I am amazed that all these ugly, violent things actually happened and I am awed by the courage of the community leaders and foot soldiers. It is important to know your history. Diane McWhorter worked on this for 19 years and won the Pulitzer Prize. It is extremely well researched documented.

[Carina · Rating 3 out of 5]

FINALLY. Wow, this book took me forever to read. It's so huge and densely packed with information that I really don't know how to rate it. There were parts I liked a lot and other parts where I just felt overwhelmed by all the names flying at me. I would certainly need to read it more than once to have a chance of absorbing it all.

[Brian Bess · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Autobiography of Bombingham

Journalist Diane McWhorter is a Birmingham native who was ten at the time that the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing killed four young girls and had her eleventh birthday just a few weeks before the assassination of JFK. She was born into one of the old affluent white families in Birmingham, with a lineage of men who had been influential movers and shakers in the city's history. In this sense, she was born on the wrong side of history, as she says, so this massive account of the city's history and the racial pressure cooker that exploded in 1963 is personal as well as historical. In uncovering the social, political climate of this troubled industrial metropolis she must also do a great deal of genealogical soul-searching.

This book is by no means a quick, fast-paced narrative; nevertheless, it is an indispensable document for anyone that wants to understand the epicenter of the 1960's civil rights movement. McWhorter tells everything you'd ever care to know about the history of Birmingham and plenty more. The cast of characters makes 'War and Peace' seem like a sparsely populated historical tale. Much as Tolstoy's original intent to explore the Decembrist revolt led him back to the seminal circumstances and the larger historical canvas, McWhorter uses the pivotal dramatic moment in the city's history, the church bombing that killed the four girls, as the impetus for an epic investigation into the culture of the city that made such an event not only possible but inevitable.

Birmingham, the 'Pittsburgh of the South', seemed predisposed for social and political unrest almost from the beginning. Earlier in the century, labor disputes and the ensuing suppression of labor unions and the outside Communist agitators were the predominant struggles, with the rigid Jim Crow social structure keeping the Negro population subservient by denying opportunities for employment or education, thus ensuring that that racial demographic remained powerless through poverty as well as ignorance. As glimmerings of resistance from the black population began to be noticed, the Communist threat began to be merged with the Negro threat to the extent that the white power structure fused the two into one neatly packaged enemy.

McWhorter devotes equal time and space to all the sides in the ensuing struggles. She explains how the power structure was a carefully woven tapestry binding the political leaders with the business leaders with the news media with the KKK with the states' rights proponents. The public safety commissioner/boss Bull Connor was a stereotypical racist redneck tyrant who would have been hilariously buffoonish (“Negroes and whites will not segregate together”) if he wasn't so frighteningly powerful. Mayor Tom Hanes may have been the ostensible leader of the city but Bull was the real power behind the scenes. He ruled the police force and made the Klan's terrorist activity easier to implement with impunity.

On the other side of the color barrier, the local leader of the civil rights movement was Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. Shuttlesworth was also a very colorful character, as flamboyant as he was fearless. He had been physically beaten in front of Phillips High School and miraculously survived the explosion of a bomb planted literally under his bedroom. He had gotten back up and brushed himself off so many times he was said to have nine lives. Never one to mince words, he was never thought of as a diplomat and had to cede the floor of the public platform to the eloquent orator and universally acknowledged leader Martin Luther King who, in McWhorter's account, had a habit of arriving on a scene after a tremendously violent episode to calm fears and give voice to the vision of the movement. Shuttlesworth was the primary force goading King into a more activist role, which King did, not without reluctance, in visiting Birmingham and being arrested and incarcerated, leading him to write the manifesto of the movement, the 'Letter from the Birmingham Jail'.

On the Washington front, President John Kennedy was preoccupied with attempting to thaw out the cold war relations with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, which also necessitated repairing the conflicting message the U.S. was sending to the Soviets as well as the rest of the world that promoted the U.S. as a bastion of freedom while treating a large segment of its population as third class citizens. When photos of police dogs nipping at protesters (many of them children) and fire hoses blowing them across a street along with the clothes off their backs hit the national and international media, the Kennedy's knew they had to do something to put out the conflagration.

At the same time that the President and his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy were trying to simultaneously placate and discourage Martin Luther King, the Attorney General was giving consent to J. Edgar Hoover's campaign to wiretap King's calls and monitor his comings and goings to uncover the Communist connection that Hoover was certain was there somewhere.

Change was seen as inevitable even among white leaders who saw Bull Connor as doing more harm than good, not only through the fire hoses and dogs but by putting thousands of demonstrating school children in jail. The only way they could oust him was by eliminating his office. Even then, he was going to make the most of his remaining tenure.

The Klan grew marginalized and no longer received unofficial consent from the city leaders and police force, which did not mean that their terrorist activities would abate. The most extreme of the fanatics were as meticulous in their bomb making as chemists. Bombings had occurred for a number of years, even church bombings although, to date, no one had been killed in any of them. That is, until the morning of September 15 when a group of girls were in the basement putting on their robes for a choral performance in the upcoming morning church service. Just after 10 that morning, at least ten sticks of dynamite placed against the foundation next to the wall exploded, blowing a massive hole in the side of the building and burying the girls in a mountain of wreckage.

McWhorter describes the long and protracted aftermath, including a comedy of errors investigation conducted by city and state and FBI officials, each trying to out-scoop the other. Utimately, in 1977, one of the bombers, Robert Chambliss, was sentenced and convicted on one count of murder. It wasn't until 2001 that an incriminating tape of a conversation Thomas Blanton had with his wife in which he admitted to being involved in the bombing was admitted as evidence, convicting him on four counts of murder and a life sentence. One year later, Bobby Cherry was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Concurrent with her account of the civil rights conflict of Birmingham, McWhorter recounts where she was in her life at the time. In her ten year old conscience, in spite of her upbringing and her father's Saturday night 'civil rights' meetings about which the rest of the family knew nothing, she knew something was wrong with this picture. The murder of girls close to her age brought the tragedy closer to her realm of experience. In writing this exhaustive account, she also attempts to uncover the extent to which her father may have been involved in Klan activities. The most she gets out of him in later years when researching her book is that he knew many of these people and knew of many of their activities. To her relief, he drew the line at killing anyone, especially innocent victims.

Continuing the Tolstoy analogy, she includes more epilogues than Tolstoy's opus, including afterwords, postscripts and a 2012 update including the contemporary effort in Alabama to marginalize the current minority, illegal immigrants, along with those who attempt to follow the avenues of legal immigration status. Jim Crow has now become Juan Crow and the ethnic threat has largely supplanted the traditional racial threat. She assesses the mindset of the native citizen of Birmingham who must reconcile him or herself to this violent past either by safely consigning it to the pages of history or a more sobering alternative, the long, painful process of personal and regional introspection. This massive account serves as a vital historical document as well as a therapeutic personal history for one of those natives.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

The full story of Birmingham

I did not know that this book had won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 2001 when I started reading it. It richly deserves the prize. Written by a "baby boomer" who as a pre-adolescent during the crucial years of the 60's, lived in Birmingham as a privileged member of white society. Later in life, seeking to understand the history of that time she embarked on a 20-year project to set down the history of the 20th century in Birmingham.

She tells the story in its full complexity, then added postscripts of the trial in 2001 of two of the church bombers, who murdered four schoolchildren in 1963, and finally the passing of icon Fred Shuttlesworth in 2012.

[Women's National Book Association of New Orleans · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Women's National Book Association sent this book to the White House today (March 16) in honor of Women's History Month: https://www.wnba-centennial.org/book-...

From the Women's National Book Association's press release:

In Carry Me Home, McWhorter returns to Birmingham in 1963, the site of civil rights demonstrations met with brutal resistance by law enforcement and the bombing of a historic black church that left four innocent black girls dead under the rubble. After Birmingham, segregation, America’s version of apartheid, became unsustainable. McWhorter tells the story of Birmingham in compelling and, at times shocking, detail. Reviewers frequently use the word “novelistic” to describe this work, referencing Tolstoy’s War & Peace and Homer’s Iliad.

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Diane McWhorter’s Carry Me Home covers the role of Birmingham, Alabama as an unwitting center of the Civil Rights Movement. McWhorter (a Birmingham native herself) chronicles the city’s founding in the 1870s as a steel town, riven by the usual class and racial differences that grew steadily exacerbated through the 20th Century. McWhorter chronicles the different strands of resistance to integration, from the genteel town fathers (notably James A. Simpson, a corporation lawyer who cut his teeth crushing unions in the 1930s) munching gourmet salads at the country clubs, to the foot soldiers of segregation: the Ku Klux Klan, the National States Rights Party and other goons who enforce Jim Crow with bombs and blackjacks, or the goonish Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor. Against them are an array of activists, from communists and labor leaders to the Civil Rights Movement. The book’s hero is Fred Shuttlesworth, a courageous Birmingham organizer who leads boycotts and confrontational (though non-violent) protests pushing for integration. After a cycle of protests and violence Birmingham’s plight gains the attention of Martin Luther King and the SCLC, who spearhead the May 1963 protests which resulted in police unleashing dogs and firehoses on unarmed school children. The stark photographs and film recordings of this incident galvanized President John F. Kennedy into backing Civil Rights legislation and added a moral imperative to the Civil Rights Movement; it also steeled the foes of integration, from Governor George Wallace to the Klansmen and creeps in Birmingham’s back alleys, to more drastic action - culminating in the infamous 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, which killed four Black girls in September 1963.

Perhaps because of her Southern background, McWhorter eschews the usual cliches about the Civil Rights Movement by painting a multilayered portrait of a southern town facing drastic change (even inserting memories of her own childhood into the narrative at points). She connects the conservative backlash to the New Deal with the later “massive resistance” to segregation; tactics tried in the FDR era against popular economic reforms and labor unions were used, with greater impact, to defend white supremacy. She’s deeply interested in exploring the tortured dynamics of both white and Black societies within Birmingham: the book sketches many of the creepier personalities, from the bloviating, straight-from-central casting Bull Connor (viewed with distaste by the genteel White Citizens Councils, but indispensable to maintaining the racial order) to “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss and Asa Carter, the deeply revolting Klan organizer, murderer and George Wallace speechwriter (and later, best-selling novelist). Perhaps the most odious figure is Gary Thomas Rowe, the notorious FBI informant with the Klan who, McWhorter shows, took part directly in some of the era’s most heinous actions (including attacks on Freedom Riders, the murder of Viola Liuzzo and possibly even the 16th Street bombing) using his Bureau connections as a shield. Governor Wallace is portrayed, predictably but not inaccurately, as an opportunist eager to fan the flames of hatred for political advantage. Not that the national authorities come off better: the Kennedy Administration, aside from a few courageous officials like John Doar, seems mostly concerned with public relations; and J. Edgar Hoover, with his near-pathological hatred of Martin Luther King, observes racist violence passively when not actively assisting it.

McWhorter also proves adept at graphing dissensions within the Civil Rights Movement. Her hero, again, is Shuttlesworth, the self-described “Bad N****r” who was arrested, beaten, shot at, bombed and yet continued to persevere, leading protest after protest. Shuttlesworth has little use for Martin Luther King, whom he considers a vainglorious interloper, and the book’s most interesting passages explore the tensions between the two Civil Rights leaders. King does come off, sometimes, as overly calculated in McWhorter’s telling, but then he was playing to a national audience (his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, with its stark eloquence about the moral imperative of integration, eclipsed everything else from Birmingham); Shuttlesworth, as a local organizer, had more at immediate stake in the city protests and less use for PR than tangible results. The two men nonetheless forged an extremely fruitful alliance, forcing the hand of a foot-dragging Federal government into embracing Civil Rights and dismantling Jim Crow. It’s an epochal triumph soured by violent backlash, which McWhorter shows in this starkly illuminating, deeply felt book. One of the best histories of the Civil Rights Era yet written.

[Matt McCormick · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s always good to be reminded of the titanic struggle, bravery and courage shown by average people to achieve extraordinary results. Unlike those who fight for god or country, the people of the Movement fought for dignity and rights basic to every human. I often think their efforts are more monumental.

There were many excellent sections of this very long book. The author successfully brought the Children’s March to an emotional climax. She gave over do praise to hero’s like Bevel, Nash and especially Shuttlesworth. She provided important background to understand the City of Birmingham. Unfortunately, the power of the story was too often overcome by the copious details. It was if she couldn’t help share every single fact she dug, with obvious hardworking, from the mines of history. How much detail does a reader really need about the comings and goings of the slack jawed drunken yokels that made up the Alabama Klan?

The story of the Civil Rights Movement is inspiring, painful and necessary to hear over and over again. I appreciate this perspective on one city and the part it’s varied inhabitants played in history. I’m saddened to be reminded that it took the fire hosing and bombing deaths of small children to bring a majority of white Americans ( not likely a wide majority) to the place they should have arrived 200 years before.

[George Bradford · Rating 3 out of 5]

Terrorism -- bombings, murders, assaults, sabotage and other forms of mayhem -- is a coward's business. Only a coward would assemble a group of men to assault a single victim. Only a coward would blow up a residence or church where children were present. Only a coward would wear a white sheet over his face to conceal his identity while committing these crimes.

A coward would also support these atrocities without actually being involved in it.

A coward would also observe this madness, know that it is wrong, and then look the other way. A coward would hope that even though he wasn't willing to do anything about it, the atrocities would stop.

There's no shortage of cowards in Diane McWhorter's "Carry Me Home". From the perpetrators, to the supporters, to the enablers, to the deniers, the parade of cowards has no end.

But there are other role players as well.

To be fair, McWhorter paints a complex picture of a complicated town. Birmingham, Alabama, in spite of its reputation, is not one dimensional. The bad guys don't all wear black hats. The good guys don't always have pure motives. Good intentions often produce unintended harm. Thoughtful plans backfire.

The wealthy Birmingham bulls exploit the hourly wage workers. They stoke their fears and prey on their insecurities. A lot of the violence is a consequence of keeping wages low and jobs scarce. The uneducated laborer doesn't hate his neighbor because of the color of his skin, he's terrified by the threat of losing his livelihood to him.

"First they'll take our schools, then they'll take our jobs" is the mantra that leads the fearful to acts of violence.

Terrorism is a coward's business, indeed.

[John Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Took me a while but a profound book. Highly recommend.

[Debbie · Rating 3 out of 5]

OK. Now that I have the anger out I can get to the real review of the book. What I have long thought is that the plight of blacks in this country happened because, as opposed to what we learn in school, the South won the Civil War, defeating the emancipation principle in civilian life. Certainly the North won the battles and the country did not split, but where was the freedom promised to blacks? 100 years later, in this book, here the blacks are seeking to have access to the rights GUARANTEED to them by the Consitution. Rights regularly denied them by the governments in the states comprising the old Confederacy.

McWhorter takes an unblinking look at her home town, a center of racial conflict that marked the effort to continue denial of those rights. And a process of denying that we are one country, white and black. She looks at the many skirmishes and battles along that pathway, pointing out that it was largely the violent efforts of those wanting to maintain segregation and the denial of rights that brought an end to what they wanted to keep. They were their own worst enemies.

Sadly, we are seeing a move again toward the denial of rights, but in more states than just the old Confederacy. Hidden under the cloak name "States Rights", it is a movement again seeking to deny to citizens of color access to the ballot box. And that voting rights also get denied to poor whites, well, that's just collateral damage. Their fault for being poor and no better than any N-word anyway. Make no mistake, "States Rights" is an effort to reconstitute, legally, white supremacy in the US -- an effort fully supported by the Republican Party leadership. Can you say "racist"? None are so blind as those who will not see, none so deaf as those who will not hear.

Are they going to make us go through all this s*** again? Seems so. All this little old white lady can say is "damnation".

[Jim Chanin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was really excited when I got this Buck. A Pulitzer Prize winning book about Birmingham in 1963. What could be better?

To say I was disappointed is an understatement.

This is a book that is overly focused on the white elite in Birmingham which included McWhorter’s family. The book barely explores the lives of the four girls killed in the church for bombing. It mocks Martin Luther King for taking all the credit for Birmingham and ignores the fact that The African American community at that time needed a powerful leader who could negotiate with Presidents and get concessions on a national level. Dr. King was responsible for nearly every movement in the south and could only spend part of his time in Birmingham. That is not a weakness; it is an unavoidable consequence of his being a national leader.

Miss McWhorter also states that there is no difference between the north and the south in civil rights; the north needed to look down on the south in order to hide it’s all too real prejudices which were no different from the rest of the nation including the south. While the implicit bias an out right racism in the north is not debatable, the fact remains there were real differences between North and South including the legacy of slavery which was abolished in the north by 1807 and did not end in the south until they lost the Civil War.

This was a disappointing book which managed to focus largely on white people even though it was about Birmingham in 1963, the year white racists blew the main African American church in Birmingham and killed four little girls.

It is very long and I would recommend almost any book about this era instead of this one.

[Jr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good history of the civil rights movement in Birmingham starting in the 1930s when it was largely supported by the Communist Party. Goes into a fair amount of detail on the early years and incredible detail for the events surrounding the 1963 actions and the KKK bombings. Slow reading because it is dense with details but I think that is also its power and its great value. It makes for a very rich history and is of enormous value of having synthesized information from interviews and historical records -- including police records and trial transcripts.

Author gives a lot of inside information about the civil rights organzations, the KKK and other opponents, the FBI and their highly ambiguous role and the political figures at the local, state and national level.

My one complaint is actually that it is too short. It ends quickly after the culminating events for 1963 -- protests and bombings. We know the aftermath at a national level -- civil rights legislation, etc. but I would have been fascinated to know how Birmingham changed as a result.

[Paul Boger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exhaustive, and exhausting, chronicle of how desegregation came to Birmingham, after decades of anti-labor violence became anti-civil rights violence. "Carry Me Home" is a minutely detailed example of how brutally we fight against class change, and how many interlocking layers of our society use fear and coercion to maintain the status quo. I can't help but wish the story was more simply told here, though, as I struggled to maintain focus and clarity through the many strands of her narrative. A definitive work, about a pivotal period of American history, but often a tough read.

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

McWhorter's family was all over the Birmingham map in 1963; her father was on the slippery slope from the gentry to the trailer park, and her uncle was an important lawyer and Big Mule, the name given to the citizens of Birmingham who actually controlled the town. Part of the book feels a bit ungainly. McWhorter will stop her narrative to let you know what her 11 year-old self was experiencing during that tumultuous year. It isn't until the end that she tries to uncover what her racist father was up to, and then it turns out . . . not much, if you define "not much" as not beating Freedom Riders or blowing up small children at the 16th Street Baptist Church. The net impression is that she is trying to establish home girl credentials that will underpin her narrative.

She needn't have bothered. The book is more than capable of standing on the merits of McWhorter's research, which is so exhaustive that the reader will feel as though he has visited Birmingham. She seems to have a burr under her saddle about the contrasting roles of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Fred Shuttlesworth, a minister who was at the heart of the "Movement" that desegregated Birmingham that year. King is always late to the party, or timid. It is Shuttlesworth who leads the black citizens in boycotts of downtown businesses and sit-ins at lunch counters. It is the troubled James Bevel, then husband of Diane Nash, who conceives and executes the most effective and dangerous approach to the struggle. He sends the young people into the streets, determined to be arrested until they have followed Gandhi's precept and filled the jails to overflowing.

There were so many dramatic events that year that the book overflows: Wallace barring the door of the University of Alabama against the two African-Americans who tried to attend that year (there had been two women in the 1950s), routine bombings by the Klan, rallies, marches --- and it all leads to the church bombing eight short days after the March on Washington that August. Four teen girls were killed in the basement of the Baptist Church, capping a murky collusion between various far-right groups, the FBI and members of the Birmingham Police Department. It would be ten years before anyone went to prison for the crime, and another 37 before the last two conspirators were charged. No authority emerges from the story unscathed.

Very interesting. Recommended.

[Rajesh Kandaswamy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a detailed view of the civil rights moment in Birmingham. It leads up to the church bombing that killed four black girls in the summer of 1963. The author, a white woman, was the same age as the girls at the time of the bombing. She grew up in Birmingham in an established family. She, like her grandmother, grew up wary about her cagey father’s involvement in these events. The book, in part, appears to be a quest to understand him along with what occurred.
This book covers the facts and actions extensively with a wide cast of characters. The growth of Birmingham as a city, the local economy, different groups that run it, and their motivations are all portrayed well. The action revolves around the local politicians, business leaders, and the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, including Dr. Martin Luther King. Many of the events of the preceding years such as the Freedom Riders, the Stand in the Schoolhouse Door are covered.

While the detail is helpful, the unflinching narrowness of scope (limited to leaders on both sides and those who were deeply involved) created gaps in the picture. While I understood the dynamics that drove the oppressors, I never got a clear picture of black life, or even of a few people. The book left me with a better understanding of the author’s family (not implying that she spent a lot of time on it), but not of any of the black citizens. I could have also used some additional commentary and some handholding by the author to slow down and connect the dizzying narrative.

Even without the commentary, a couple of things stand out. It is striking how those in power were either the problem, complicit, or turned a blind eye. Even when they did not promote the crimes, those in power bent the scales of justice horribly afterward. It also showed the powerlessness of the central government then. It reminds one that while equal rights and treatment might be as clear as day for most of us, it really is not. Not everyone even considered that possibility. The struggle was for inches, something as small as having access to bathrooms or getting less than a handful promoted to a slightly better job. Such progress in inches, while commendable on those who try, begs the question if the system and its perpetuators will only give in just enough to make the problem go away. It is hard to miss the parallel to today – how some distract the majority from really paying attention to the simmering issues that lead to the protests by pointing to any other damage caused.

[Nikki · Rating 5 out of 5]

I admired this book a lot more than I enjoyed it, but I am very glad that I read it. I’ve come away in awe of the thorough and detailed research and that went into it, and feeling that I have learned more than I expected to, but I have to admit that this was one of the most challenging reading experiences I’ve ever had. While reading, I thought that this was just because of the concentration this exceptionally detailed book demands. We don’t get to the book’s focal point - “The Year of Birmingham, 1963” - until page 285, and the narrative introduces a multitude of bit-part characters along the way, including biographical asides that sometimes continue in lengthy footnotes. On reflection though, I think that my difficulties came just as much from the sense of unease produced by the complexity and contrariness of the story itself. Perhaps most importantly, I came away from this book feeling deeply convinced of the importance of seeing current affairs through a historical lens – not the sort that presents a simplified story in support of a pre-selected narrative framework, but the kind that refuses to make sweeping generalisations, and resolutely insists on facing up to contradictory and complex evidence as well as data that fits a preconceived viewpoint.

As a newcomer to the US, I’m embarrassed to admit that before this my knowledge of the civil rights movement wasn’t much more sophisticated than my children’s (think “ I am Martin Luther King Jr”-level), and I suppose that I was expecting this to be a more grown-up and detailed version of the same story: a straightforward inspirational tale about the inevitable triumph of courage and human decency in the face of bigoted opposition, and the power of determined non-violent resistance. After all, the author describes “the saga of African-American liberation” in her preface as “perhaps the most thrilling in our country’s history, biblical in its subtexts and angles of moral instruction”. The story presented here is far more nuanced and ambiguous, however – the book even presents “a somewhat unorthodox, pre-glory view of Martin Luther King”, favouring instead Birmingham’s home-grown leader Fred Shuttlesworth, who is described as “goading” King into action. The book also explains that it was Jim Bevel who organised the student protest marches of 1963, (producing the images of dogs and hoses being used against children that had such a powerful effect on national public opinion), and that King agreed to the children’s participation only reluctantly. It also shows how large a part competing factions (I quickly lost track of all the acronyms), shifting allegiances, and petty political manoeuvring played in the history of both sides of the struggle.

Just as the heroes of the movement are presented as flawed and human, the historic ‘villains’ are also revealed as more complex characters (with the possible exception of Commissioner Bull Connor!). Governor Wallace, who is remembered for his 1963 inaugural speech calling for “segregation forever” and his subsequent “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door”, was not a segregationist at heart, but (perhaps even worse?) a former liberal who adopted racist policies as a calculated strategy to get elected. Similarly, as well as receiving covert encouragement from the more obvious supporters of segregation in the local police, the KKK’s violence was “abetted by the bureaucratic negligence of the U.S. government”. One of the more horrifying incidents described in the book was the vicious beating of the Freedom Riders arriving at a Birmingham bus station in May 1961, in which the Ku Klux Klan members were promised in advance that the local police would wait 15 minutes before intervening. That event marked the beginning of the FBI’s passive observation of the developing violence associated with their valued Klan informant Tommy Rowe, about which the author makes the deadpan observation, “almost as soon as he infiltrated the organization, Klan violence in Birmingham flared, and would burn for as long as he remained in town”. The often arbitrary nature of the story’s key events adds to the sense of tragedy – the group that carried out the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist church, killing four young girls, are revealed as “a band of barely functional outlaws”, and the deaths themselves only occurred because a faulty timer delayed the explosion, which was intended to happen at midnight when the church would have been empty. Most unsettling for me was reading about how normalised this type of violence had become: the complicity of the police & local government, and the lack of reaction to the existence of criminality and brutality, with the blame tending to be placed on outside activists stirring up trouble, and punishment – if any – often being reserved for the victims. It also bothered me that the narrative of progress didn’t feel inevitable. Key changes and legislation seemed to be brought about by haphazard political manoeuvring or by public reactions to incidents that were either stage managed or just happened to get press attention, while more brutal realities went unchallenged.

One part of the book that I did unequivocally enjoy was the author’s perspective as a white girl “growing up on the wrong side” of the events of 1960s Birmingham, who as an adult chose to devote nineteen years of her life to researching this “magnificent nonviolent revolution”, but was still able to recall her teenage interpretation of events as “Our Way of Life” came under threat. I felt that her personal experience of the fact that “keen moral certainty blesses both sides of a social revolution” made the story more intelligible. One striking example is her conclusion that her father, who sometimes left Klan literature lying around in his office, did “really believe that the Movement was a Communist conspiracy to mongrelize America”. I found the preface and introduction of the book, which were written in a more lyrical style and emphasised this personal, reflective angle, particularly compelling – a glimpse perhaps of an alternative book that she might have written. I think I’d have enjoyed reading that one more than this exceptionally dense and complex piece of scholarship, but it would have been a far less valuable contribution to the history of the time.

[Pete · Rating 5 out of 5]

journalistic megafauna about our new hometown; felt like i needed to read this before picking up my nonexistent birmingham citizen card. heroic research/reporting driven work in the same line as Lukas' Common Ground, with a big difference - rather than being an observer to the events at the center of the story, McWhorter was a little girl in 1963 (a year of tension-violence-terrorism that i'd might have called "unparalleled" or "world-changing" except it has parallels and the old, bad parts of 1963 seems to still be with us). her father was also, maybe, a fringe participant in klan- or klan-adjacent activity, although that element of the book didn't really sustain a ton of tension. so anyway this is a biography of a place (birmingham) and some people (jim crow politicians and civic leaders, civil rights leaders, diane mcwhorter and her milieu) wrapped around the story of iconic moments of state and terrorist violence. It's also warm and humane and understands its subjects as humans (in fred shuttlesworth's case, charismatically liable to ignore the threat or commission of grievous injury in the pursuit of righteous ends). i dunno if this book will fry your egg as much as it fried mine over a month of lawn-mowing and exercising unless you have some filament to alabama/birmingham, but even if you don't, you might get your egg fried.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinary pieces of non fiction. Exhaustively researched, deeply felt, more details than I could somehow take in, I fond it both impossible to put down and excruciating to read. McWhorter's connections between the steel industry, mining, the labor movement, the Klan and the Civil Rights movement were fascinating and revealing. It's hard to know who was worse - the Kennedys, Hoover, the Klan - the culpability is off the charts.

I hope McWhorter writes a memoir because she has an incredible style and how she ever got from Birmingham to the NYT is a story I want to know.

[Luanne Coachman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A work of monumental research that follows both major and minor characters in the story of how Birmingham, AL was dragged kicking and screaming into the post segregation era. The casual sadism of the white supremacist side is horrifying and the dogged persistence of the Movement leaders inspiring in the face of both white violent resistance and a kind of don’t rock the boat apathy on the part of many on both sides of the color line. What dropped this book for me from a 5 star to a 4 was the understandable challenge Ms McWhorter faced in assembling so much detail into something that could be read and comprehended by an ordinary curious individual. She gathered it mostly into her arms, but not quite all.

[Ellen Morris Prewitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Diane McWhorter's history of Birmingham is so completely riveting that I read every footnote. It is essential reading for an understanding of the civil rights era of the South.

[Josebud · Rating 5 out of 5]

RTC...

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

So glad I read this book in preparation for a trip to Birmingham - it provided much needed context and background on critical figures in the civil rights movement who have not received MLK's level of national attention, like Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, the man who was the catalyst for change and opposition in the Birmingham crucible of the 1960s.

JFK said that the civil rights movement owed as much to city commissioner Bull Connor as it did to MLK, and it's true. One would be hard pressed to create a crueler, more racist, more uncaringly violent public figure than the man who staunchly opposed desegregation, jailed children, called on police to blast protesters with water cannons, openly consorted with the Klan, supported the evil men who bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church, and undermined the attempts to bring those criminals to justice.

In fact, it boggles my mind that while Robert Chambliss was convicted of the bombing in 1977, his co-conspirators were free men for 30 years after the deadly act - until a U.S. attorney finally brought them to justice in 2001.

That attorney? Alabama's newest senator - Doug Jones.

The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Read this book. And if you get a chance, visit Birmingham. The ghosts of recent history pervade the city streets.

[Don · Rating 3 out of 5]

McWhorter has written a history of the civil rights movement with particular focus on Birmingham, Alabama, her home town. She grew up during that era and was a contemporary of the 4 girls killed in the infamous church bombing in 1963.

The most interesting part of the book, to me, is the attention paid to the white power structure and government of the city. My recollection of the Taylor Branch monumental trilogy about the civil rights movement is that its focus is almost entirely on the movement and its participants.

The problem with this book is that it is an exhaustive history, in every sense of the word. She has left out no detail of the meetings, debates and actions of all of the players, including the KKK.The book is simply wearying. By the time she arrives at the church bombing, with her elaborately detailed descriptions of the perpetrators, I no longer cared about the details and just skimmed from there through to the end. She closes the book with an also extremely long postscript.

The book may be a tremendous resource for future historians, but for the casual reader, it was a real slog.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was looking for an interesting history of the Civil Rights movement. This wasn't it.

The book is thorough and well written, but it just isn't an interesting read. It often contains too much detail as the author attempts to maintain historical accuracy and enlighten us on the personalities of hundreds of participants.

Having slogged through the first 200 or so pages, I began to skim the chapters. I'd find something interesting and read that section. There are some good parts to this book, they are just buried in all of the details.

[Julie McDougal · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a well-written, important book. I love Birmingham, Alabama & hate its civil rights history. I moved to the South from the Pacific Northwest in the early 80’s. The South’s history is not my history. Birmingham, Alabama is, thankfully, a very different place than it used to be. I understand the importance of documenting history & not forgetting. I also understand that it will take 29 years for me to read every book on my to-read list, if I read one book a week & add no additional books, so I’m moving on to greener pastures.

[Shawn Feeney · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are interested in the Civil Rights struggle in the late 50’s and early 60’s, Birmingham was the epicenter. It’s easy to see why the writer was awarded a Pulitzer for this book. Extremely detailed account of what went down in her hometown and how the Kennedy administration tried to deal with it. Might be the best book I’ve ever read on the subject.

[Erik · Rating 4 out of 5]

***3.5 stars***

If you're interested--and I mean *really* interested--in Birmingham and the Civil Rights movement, this book is for you. Otherwise, it's a bit of a slog.

[Jennifer W · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's lots to say about this book. First off, I consider myself pretty well aware of the people and events of the Civil Rights Movement. But there were still So Many Names I did not know. Most bafflingly is how is it I have never heard of Fred Shuttlesworth? He was the Martin Luther King Jr of Birmingham. I consider King a personal hero, but he wasn't really even in Birmingham until 1962/63! Shuttlesworth was there doing all the hard work. And nearly getting killed for it at least 3 times! He was alive well into the 2000s, yet still, I don't recall ever hearing his name before this book.

Speaking of names... Lordy, there are names! Freedom Riders, protestors, preachers, police officers, the infamous police dogs, journalists, the people in (federal, state, and local!) government, the KKK, the neoNazis, the communists, the waitstaff at the country clubs, the miners, the teachers, the janitors, seriously, I would not be surprised if there were over 1000 people named in this book! Some of them come up repeatedly, but after so long an absence, that I'm *still* not sure if they were a good guy or a bad one! I'd say this book needs a cheat sheet, but it'd be 10 pages long!

I listened to this book. I normally don't like to listen to nonfiction on audiobooks. I don't know why, it doesn't flow for me as well or something. I didn't really get into this book until we got to the 60s. The book covers Birmingham's entire history, including how it was founded as a mining town, which lead into the power structures that were well in place to hold fast to segregation. It detailed Bull Connor's life (originally a radio baseball announcer) and George Wallace's (originally a proponent of integration until he realized he could build a political career on segregation). It detailed a lot of other stuff that has unfortunately already slipped out of my brain. In addition to the (thousands, I swear!) names, the narrator read very fast. This was not a book on any level that I could listen to while doing dishes, cooking dinner, or driving because it required all of my attention. That said, I don't fault Xe Sands for reading so fast. The audiobook was 29 hours long as it was! Had she read any slower, it woulda taken 39!

All that said, why did I read this book? Why did I stick with it? The events that happened in Birmingham are important and still relevant. They cut to the soul of this country as it was, as it is, and as it can become. For good and evil all the way around. The KKK and neo Nazis haven't gone away. Hell, they haven't even stopped attacking people in churches. Yet the fight against the forces of evil have helped bend the arc of human history (slowly) towards justice. You can't brush off your hands and say "well, those fights are long over", cause they're not. We've come a long way, but there are still politicians who say the quiet parts out loud. Maybe they don't quite go as far as "Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" and maybe they don't give the Klan 15 minutes head start on beating bus riders before the police will respond, but they channel those days and those sentiments. I pray we don't have to lose innocent young people in new church shoes to make us see that those hateful feelings are alive and dangerous.

[Jay Louttit · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've always been in agreement with those who think that America's greatest sin is slavery followed by Jim Crow segregation. However, that has always left me feeling that while there is quite a ways to go and story to tell, America's greatest triumph is emancipation/integration. As Americans we need to know the story of the fall so that we can know, celebrate and continue the story of our redemption. The story of the civil rights movement always captures my heart and my imagination. In Carry Me Home, McWhorter focuses on the struggle through the lens of Birmingham and includes her own memories and complex family experiences and the result is a thorough accounting of some of our best and worst moments of the American experience. The book is well sourced and reported and gives a lot of insight into the racial and economic history of segregation and the civil rights movement. It is unflinching in its reflections of what most Americans were willing to believe and accept while also beautifully captures those who were brave enough to stand up against the racism and status quo. It also gives a lot of insight to those who went along with the change either with a change in their heart or for economic reasons as well as those who continued to fight progress with hatred and violence. This book is effective at painting a picture of how most Americans could go from a society where it was just understood that African-Americans were an inferior second class not worthy of equality to a society that accepted African-Americans into the highest levels of education, medicine, business, and government within just a generation or two. While not absolving us for our sins or implying that all our biases and prejudices are gone or might not manifest in how we continue treat African Americans and other minority groups. Carry Me Home, is an unflinching look at who we have been in the past but also the progress we are capable of.