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

"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 more >>

"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.Jon WienerThe NationThe most important book on the movement since Taylor Branch'sParting the Waters.It should become a classic.David Herbert DonaldAuthor ofLincolnA tour de force, comparable in importance to J. Anthony Lukas'sCommon Groundand Taylor Branch'sParting the Waters.Carry Me Homeis destined to become a classic in the history of the civil rights revolution.Francine ProseO MagazineHer narrative takes on the suspense of a detective novel....Carry Me Homeis an ambitious, panoramic history with enough personal memoir to make us see why Diane McWhorter cannot forget -- and wants us to remember -- the momentous events that took place during one historic year in one Alabama city.The Washington Post Book WorldCarry Me Homeis a case study in how the privileged and powerful can operate behind the scenes to control and, when it is in their interests, undermine and corrupt the social fabric.The New YorkerMcWhorter's own involvement in the story...reenergizes the struggle, serving as a reminder that history is always personal.Publishers Weekly(starred)The story of civil rights in Birmingham, Alabama, has been told before -- from the unspeakable violence to the simple, courageous decencies -- but fresh, sometimes startling details distinguish this doorstop page-turner told by a daughter of the city's white elite. [McWhorter] brings a gripping pace and an unusual, twofold perspective to her account, incorporating her viewpoint as a child...as well as her adult viewpoint as an avid scholar and journalist.Paul RosenbergThe Denver PostMcWhorter's remarkable clarity and candor, her relentless focus on the enormous forces of stasis, reaction and accommodation that defined life in Birmingham, illuminate this past so vividly we cannot avoid the unspoken challenge to finally come to terms with it, however difficult that may yet be.Paul RosenbergHarper BarnesSt. Louis Post-DispatchDiane McWhorter's powerful moral epic about the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama, contains all the elements of first-rate history, including dauntingly thorough research, a sure grasp of the big picture as well as the tiny details that illuminate it, evocative writing that brings action and character springing off the page, and a novelist's sense of how to mold a compelling narrative arc out of the innumerable molecules of historical fact.Ellen DahnkeThe TennesseanBirmingham's story will strike a chord with every Southerner who lived through that crucible, but it is as much a tribute to McWhorter's gifts that readers will feel as if they walk Birmingham's streets during that period as if through their own hometown.Craig FlournoyThe Dallas Morning NewsThe product of nineteen years of research,Carry Me Homeis a brilliant work of history.Chapter Eight: Pivot

Hoover

The Freedom Rides were proving to be one of history's rare alchemical phenomena, altering the structural makeup of everything they touched. They had engineered what was perhaps Birmingham's major civic turning point since Joe Gelders revealed to the La Follette committee that U.S. Steel had terrorists on its payroll. In the continuing evolution of vigilantism in Birmingham, the Freedom << less