Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, by Diane McWhorter, Simon & Schuster, 2001, 700 pp.; $35

Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the "Letter from Birmingham Jail", by S. Jonathan Bass, Louisiana State University Press, 2001, 322 pp.; $39.95

The Last Days: A Son's Story of Sin and Segregation at the Dawn of a New South, by Charles Marsh, Basic Books, 2001, 208 pp.; $25

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.

No doubt many white Birminghamians were truly dismayed at the bombs and beatings that regularly fractured the peace. But McWhorter suggests that the respected leaders of the city knew very well who was behind these acts of violence—or could have known if they had wanted to. Certainly Shuttlesworth, the Baptist pastor who fearlessly fought against segregation from the day he came to Bethel Baptist Church in 1953, knew that he was fighting against the powers that be—that the bigots who planted the bomb that blew him out of bed in 1956 (he miraculously was unhurt though his home was destroyed) were operating with police connivance, that the mob that beat and tried to kill him when he took his children to enroll in a white high school in 1957 had semi-official permission to do their work. Well-meaning whites liked to make a distinction between peaceful, law-abiding segregationists and the vigilantes who gave them a bad name, but segregation was essentially seamless in Birmingham.

And what of white Christians who recognized prejudice as wrong? While Jonathan Bass's Blessed Are the Peacemakers paints on a much smaller canvas than McWhorter's, it provides a valuable study in the mindset of white clergy. Bass's focal point is King's Letter from Birmingham Jail, written as an open letter to eight white clergymen who had criticized the civil rights movement. King's letter went unnoticed during the protests, but later came to be seen as an outstanding apology for the civil rights cause.

The eight clergy whom King addressed were prominent church and synagogue leaders, who earlier had been brave enough to issue a letter criticizing the excesses of segregationist zeal. They were Methodist, Episcopal, and Catholic bishops along with the pastors of leading Baptist, Presbyterian, and Jewish congregations. Bass is sympathetic to them, enabling us to see them as genuinely good men who, in some cases, suffered cruelly for their few and weak statements in favor of African American concerns. He sketches their stories to show us how difficult it was to be even a moderate during that era, and how varied white clergy really were.

Most of the clergy understood that the South had to change. They saw prejudice as wrong, genuinely disliked Klan violence, and made muted statements against both. Such comments invariably led to angry denunciations, late-night harassment, and attempts to force them from their jobs. The bishops survived unscathed, and Catholic Joseph Durick actually grew into an active leader in the cause of social equality. ("This is my bishop!" Baptist Ralph Abernathy shouted when Durick entered his Memphis jail cell during protests in 1969. "My bishop! Yes, praise the Lord, my bishop!")

Rabbi Milton Grafman spoke passionately to his congregation about the need to take an active role in changing Birmingham, and completed his ministry as an honored leader. (Years later, the city Ministerial Association was agonizing over a motion to support racial inclusiveness in all Birmingham churches. Grafman finally spoke up, asking how many of the pastors had read the "series of little books" called the New Testament. "When you read these books and when you walk in Jesus' path, you will have your answer. He has settled this matter Gentlemen!" The motion passed unanimously.)

The Presbyterian and Baptist pastors, however, unprotected by a church hierarchy, were forced from their churches. First Baptist's Earl Stallings suffered most. He had committed the unpardonable sin of welcoming Andrew Young and four other African Americans on Easter Sunday during the Birmingham protests. A picture of Stallings smiling and shaking hands with Young appeared on the front page of the New York Times. This image, which appeared long before King's Letter, defined Stallings for white Birminghamians. While many of his congregation supported him, outraged members savagely attacked him and repeatedly tried to oust him. He finally left, realizing that he could no longer minister effectively in Birmingham. More than thirty years later, he found it difficult to speak about what he had endured. His church, too, never recovered. First Baptist quarreled constantly and eventually split in two, the segregationist half selling the downtown building and moving to the suburbs.

As an interesting gloss on these histories, Charles Marsh's The Last Days describes how his father, a pastor in Mississippi, struggled to adapt to a changing world several years after Birmingham. (The title refers to the last days of segregation.) Bob Marsh was an inspired pastor and preacher, but he suffered from the moral blinders of a generation that preached fervently about purity yet could not bear to mention the hatred and fear dominating everyone's life. His low point came as the keynote speaker for the Laurel, Mississippi, Jaycee Man of the Year award. Marsh was proud to be asked to speak, and he lauded the recipient, Clifford Wilson, as "the essence of a good community." The next morning he read in the newspaper that the fbi had arrested Wilson for the Klan murder of Vernon Dahmer, a respected local resident.

Marsh fell into a deep depression, his son says, as the hypocrisy and enforced silence of Christian segregation came home to him. He eventually emerged from his funk to become a positive force in the community, as Laurel peacefully integrated its schools and the church encouraged interracial youth gatherings. Still, he steered a politically astute course, never directly challenging the racism that pervaded his community and his church. To do so would have ended his ministry.

One great appeal of the civil rights movement is its moral clarity. We have, on one hand, the courage and fervor of the black Baptist ministers. On the other hand we have a band of hideous and vicious racists. The former have no power or political standing. The latter are often cousins to the county sheriff. And yet, the powerless win by the power of their truth and their fearless witness.

This moral tale is true. It really did happen this way. But of course, most people—like Charles Marsh's father—did not fit either description. Most people were neither unambigously brave and moral nor hideous and vicious. Most people were a muddle. "As the mood of hysteria grew during the era," Bass writes, "most of [the eight clergymen's] religious colleagues in Alabama and throughout the South remained silent and did precious little to alleviate tensions." This was true of black clergy as well as white; no more than ten or twenty percent of the African American churches in Birmingham supported King and Shuttlesworth. One lesson of these books is surely that in nasty situations a moderate isn't worth a bucket of warm spit unless he or she is loud about it—and thus gets condemned as a "radical," moderate no more.

An old joke has a black preacher in Chicago wake up his wife in the middle of the night. He tells her that he has had a dream, that Jesus told him to go to Birmingham. His wife is not so sure.

"Did Jesus say that he would go with you to Birmingham?" she asks.

"He said he would go as far as Memphis," her husband answers.

Everybody knew that Birmingham was the toughest city in the South to integrate. Martin Luther King would never have gone there except for the persistent urging of Fred Shuttlesworth, his opposite in nearly every way. King was a cool intellectual who admired Reinhold Niebuhr. Shuttlesworth had graduated from Alabama State College but retained a scattershot grammar and limited interest in books beyond the Bible. King preached in churches that abhorred disorder; Shuttlesworth ended nearly every service in a "whoop," the ecstatic, panting, shouting climax of rural Baptist preaching. King was temperamentally cautious, anxious to hear from everyone and to weigh all risks before he made a decision. Shuttlesworth was rash, autocratic, and fearless. King led by his oratory; Shuttlesworth led by example.

As an affiliate of King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Shuttlesworth's organization was the most active grassroots civil rights movement in the nation. A core of several hundred followers believed Shuttlesworth was anointed by God, because of his miraculous deliverance from bombings and beatings. They were fervent, literalistic, working-class Christians. Shuttlesworth told King he could deliver the protesters needed to make an impact. What he didn't tell King was that he couldn't deliver the African American establishment, including most of the ministers, who actively disliked him. Diplomacy never seemed very important to Shuttlesworth.

From the very first day the Birmingham movement had problems, mostly having to do with lukewarm African American support. King couldn't win over Shuttlesworth's critics. Many either worked for white bosses (as teachers, for example) or had incomes protected by the shadow world of segregation (insurance professionals, for instance). They wanted to wait and see what happened with a new city government. White moderates had finally seen that a brutal Klan was not in their economic interest. They had voted Bull Connor out of office. His replacement, Albert Boutwell, was a segregationist too, and Connor still ran the police while the courts sorted out whether the election had been legal. Still, many African Americans echoed the sentiments of the eight white clergy: the timing of protests was wrong.

Then, too, Bull Connor seemed to be getting smart. He put protesters in jail, but he kept the Klan under wraps, so there wasn't substantial violence. The numbers of protesters were minimal—dozens rather than hundreds—and soon they got tired of marching and going to jail. A boycott of downtown stores, initially the centerpiece of the protests, began to weaken. After much soul-searching King marched and went to jail, but he didn't inspire much imitation.

King had come to Birmingham partly because he desperately needed a victory. In the six years since he led the successful bus boycott in nearby Montgomery, King's accomplishments could be listed on a Post-It. Mainly he had flown around the country making speeches. In Albany, Georgia, he had been invited to rescue a stalling protest movement, which he led to galling defeat. After nearly a month of protests in Birmingham, the movement seemed headed for another Albany.

Desperate for leverage, King and his fellow movement leaders decided to let teenagers march. They had always resisted using children, especially given the notorious reputation of southern jails. A criminal record could brand an African American youth for life. But an eccentric SNCC radical named James Bevel had been recruiting young students.

Bevel's chief argument was devastating to black Baptist preachers, who baptized children as young as six or seven. Since such children were considered old enough to decide on their eternal destiny, Bevel said, surely they were old enough to decide to fight for freedom. If they were competent to weigh eternal consequences, why not temporal ones? Shuttlesworth agreed, chiefly because they had to try something. King agonized while establishment leaders expressed their horror, but Bevel and Shuttlesworth sent the children out anyway, streaming from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church by the hundreds and then the thousands.

And Bull Connor finally tripped up. If he had let the children march and pray and go home, the party would soon have been over. Instead he turned the dogs and fire hoses on them. Actually, nobody was much hurt, but the images of children knocked down and bit and hauled to jail by the busload made compelling TV footage.

Downtown Birmingham was in chaos as the children overwhelmed police lines. Birmingham was on the front page of every paper in the world. Business leaders quietly sued for peace, offering minimal desegregation in return for an end to the protests. King signed on. Shuttlesworth, who had been hospitalized after a fire hose sent him tumbling down a stairwell, was outraged at what he considered a cave-in, and he threatened to break with King. He calmed down, however, and the movement declared victory.

Although the concessions offered by whites toward desegregation were in fact relatively minor, a mental barrier had been irrevocably breached in Birmingham. Most whites there realized once and for all that segregation was over, and they began seriously if slowly to negotiate integrated public facilties, including schools.

But not all whites were ready to accept, however grudgingly, the new order. On September 15, 1963, the Klan unleashed a final spasm of violence. On that day, a Sunday, a bomb exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four black girls. Here revealed for all the world to see was the evil that had undergirded the old order, the cold brutality that had erupted visibly in countless lynchings but that was always present as a threat. Once again Birmingham was on the front page around the world. The horror and anger inspired by the bombing ensured that there was no going back.

President John Kennedy and his brother Bobby got the message: they would have to deal with civil rights, even though it would mean alienating and ultimately destroying the white Democratic Party machine in the South that had put them in power. Directly from Birmingham came the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which desegregated public facilties all over the South.

As a result, life is better in Birmingham. The city of Bull Connor had a black mayor through the eighties and early nineties, and has even erected a civil rights museum across from Kelly Ingram Park, with a statue of Fred Shuttlesworth. The pace of change has sometimes seemed agonizingly slow. It was only in May of this year that 62-year-old Thomas Blanton, Jr., a former Klansman, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment for helping to plant the bomb that killed those girls at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church almost forty years ago. Blanton was the second of four suspects in the bombing to be convicted.

Still, the change is real. On a recent visit to Alabama I was shown the elegant home of one of the wealthiest (white) men in those parts. Next door was the home of an outstanding African American surgeon. Did anyone raise a fuss, I asked, when the surgeon wanted to build there? Not that anyone could remember.

Tim Stafford is a senior writer for Christianity Today magazine. The forthcoming final volume in his series of novels, River of Freedom (www.riveroffreedom.com), will focus on the civil rights movement.

NOTE: For your convenience, the following books, which were mentioned above, are available for purchase:

• Carry Me Home, by Diane McWhorter
• Blessed Are the Peacemakers, by S. Jonathan Bass
• The Last Days, by Charles Marsh

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.
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