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Nineteen sixty-three was the pivotal year of the civil rights movement. In a city named Birmingham, where little of note had happened before and nothing earthshaking has happened since, powerful forces for and against integration collided. It was something like the Battle of Gettysburg one hundred years before, in that both sides chose deliberately to test their strength in a make-or-break struggle. The armies of the civil rights movement were led by the nonviolent Baptist preacher Martin Luther King, Jr., and the armies of the segregationists by a baseball announcer turned politician, Eugene "Bull" Connor.
King was an immediatist, which was a change from the NAACP's gradualist strategy. The NAACP had fought for change through the courts, culminating in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate schools. The NAACP would continue to pursue legal enforcement, but for King and other civil rights leaders, progress was too slow. Wily white southerners knew how to subvert, ignore, or circumvent the law. Nine years after Brown, segregation in Alabama was unchanged.
King's strategy was to make a moral rather than a legal battle by demanding rights in a confrontational though nonviolent manner, to make segregationists blow their genteel cover. It was a strategy that owed more than a little to Jesus' march on Jerusalem, where he deliberately confronted the religious and governmental powers, willingly taking their violence on himself. Not that King imagined himself as a messiah—though sometimes his young detractors in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) thought he did. Rather, he saw social evil as primarily moral and religious, and he believed that every Christian must follow in Jesus' steps to confront such evil.
Jesus had to go to Jerusalem, and in a sense King had to go to Birmingham. There, more than any city in the South, polite segregationists had linked arms with the Ku Klux Klan and other violent forces to keep integration at bay. Birmingham had earned the nickname "Bombingham" because approximately fifty times since World War II segregationists had blown up houses and even churches that threatened the status quo. When in 1961 Freedom Riders came to integrate interstate bus terminals, the Klan beat them to a pulp. So far, luckily, no one had died. But King and his band went to Birmingham well aware that such luck might not hold.
In the last few years several studies of Birmingham have appeared. The best and most important of these books is Diane McWhorter's Carry Me Home. McWhorter builds on two earlier works, Glenn Eskew's But for Birmingham and Andrew Manis's biography of the almost-forgotten Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, A Fire You Can't Put Out. McWhorter, a journalist who has worked extensively for the New York Times, was raised in Birmingham and has evidently made it her life's work. She demonstrates encyclopedic understanding of the city's past, and she is a good writer. She enables us to understand both sides, black and white, of the complex confrontations in a troubled city.
Birmingham was an unusual place, the only truly industrial city in the South and a classic colonial economy. Absentee owners, notably Pittsburgh's U.S. Steel, controlled industry. They didn't live in Birmingham so had no interest in improving the place. Birmingham politicians served the owners' interests, keeping tax on industry low (and offering few public services) while insuring that nobody gave workers any ideas about militancy. The Alabama countryside provided unskilled labor in plenty, especially as farming suffered. During the Depression, vigilantes were used against communist organizers and anyone simply accused of being a communist. The police and the Ku Klux Klan worked together as tools of the local industrial leaders, known as the Big Mules.
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