Carry me home : Birmingham, Alabama, the climactic battle of the civil rights revolution
The author tells the story of the civil rights movement in Birmingham. This book documents the history of integrating the South. It tells the story of the city called Bombingham, focusing on the black freedom fighters as well as those who resisted them - country-club elites, police, vigilantes. Meet the children who braved police dogs and fire department hoses, as well as the Ku Klux Klansmen who retaliated with dynamite. The book also contains revelations about the perpetrators of the Sunday-morning bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, which killed four black girls and still generates headlines nearly four decades later. The book also reveals the collusion between the city's establishment - the Big Mules - and its designated subordinates: public officials (including the infamous Bull Connor) and the Klansmen who did the dirty work. The author describes the competition for primacy within the movement's black leadership, especially between Birmingham's flamboyant preacher-activist, Fred Shuttlesworth, and an already world-famous King, against the backdrop of a hesitant Kennedy administration and the corrupt, Hoover-led FBI. "The Year of Birmingham," 1963, was one of the most cataclysmic periods in America's long civil rights struggle. That spring, King's child demonstrators faced down Bull Connor's police dogs and fire hoses in huge nonviolent marches for desegregation. A few months later, Ku Klux Klansmen retaliated, bombing the church and killing four innocent Black children. Yet these shocking events also brought redemption: they transformed the halting civil rights movement into a national cause and inspired the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which abolished legal segregation once and for all
Print Book, English, 2001
Simon & Schuster, New York, 2001