Transcript of Interview with Paul Kix

Paul Kix tells us the thrilling story of the fight to end Jim Crow. His book is You Have To Be Prepared To Die Before You Can Begin To Live: Ten Weeks In Birmingham That Changed America.

Transcript of Interview with Paul Kix 

Francesca: Paul Kix, welcome to Writer's Voice.

Paul Kix: Thank you for having me.

You begin this wonderful book, You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live, with a famous photograph of a Black teenage boy being attacked by a police dog in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 3rd, 1963. Why did you begin the book there?

In large measure because that's where my own interest in the story began. After my twin boys in particular were born, in fact, I should probably step back just to even a beat before that. 

I am white, my wife, Sonia, is Black. We have three kids, a 13-year-old daughter and twin 12-year-old boys. And especially after the boys were born, I felt almost an obligation to understand the Black canon better than I had thus far. And so that meant a deep dive into the Civil Rights Movement in particular.

And as I read more and more about the Civil Rights Movement, I became increasingly obsessed in some manner with what I saw as the origin story of the Civil Rights Movement, the spot where they first had success, and the origin story of what I came to see of America.

And what I mean by that is 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, the origin story of the Civil Rights Movement because that was their first real success, the origin story of America because that success meant it was the first time that America acknowledged that, yes, we will try to be fully equal. That equality was very much hard earned. 

And one of the photos that depicted how brutal that battle for equality was, was this photo of Walter Gadsden. It's one of the most iconic images of the Civil Rights Movement. He's 15 years old and his entire right side is exposed. And it is as if the German shepherd who is biting him in his obliques isn't so much biting him as like feasting on him. And yet Gadsden's face is serene.

And there was something about that photo that just captivated me and has captivated millions of others across time.Going back to the spring of 1963, it captivated the Kennedy brothers who were then in the White House.

So that was really why I wanted to describe that photo as a way to describe my own interest in this story.

And draw the line between 1963 and July of 2020 and the impact of George Floyd's death and the response to it on your children.

Yeah, so as I said, my wife, Sonia, is Black. My wife, she's also from inner city Houston. And so she grows up predominantly in Fifth Ward, which is the neighborhood adjacent to Third Ward where George Floyd grew up. George and Sonia were the same age. George was 46 when he died. George and Sonia had many friends in common, though they didn't necessarily know each other.

George went to Yates High, many of Sonia's friends, and in particular, her cousins went to Yates High. Sonia's cousin, Derek, remembered George, knew him back then, and watched him as the tight end on the Yates High football team that made it to the state championship game.

So I say that to your listenership in large part because George Floyd's death was the first time that my wife and I decided to allow our kids to watch the footage of another Black man being killed by law enforcement officials.

And we did it in large measure because Sonia and my mother-in-law Connie, who also lived with us at the time, and again, also from inner city Houston, felt that though they did not know George personally, their death carried some sort of personal reverberations in some sense.

And so we all, as a family, sat on the couch and watched CNN and watched George die. And the kids really had a hard time with it.

I was just describing the Gadsden photo, right, and how it kind of obsessed me. Because in that Gadsden photo, I saw in some measure the whole history of America.

I saw how Black people had been treated by whites. I saw the dignity with which Black people responded. I saw also what that image set in motion, everything that's happened in the last 60 years, up to and including my ability to marry someone like Sonia in a former Jim Crow state like Texas.

However, when my kids saw the image of George Floyd, the images they saw, the ones that they studied, there was nothing like hope in any of those images. Instead, there was only a hopelessness that bordered on despair. And we heard it all the time, like how our kids were gonna move away from here just as quickly as they could.

And as that summer of 2020 continued, as the footage of George continued to be spread, and as the Black Lives Matter movement spread as well across the United States, there were other shootings as well. 

Like Jacob Blake, I don't know if you remember him, Kenosha, Wisconsin cops shot Jacob Blake, a Black man, seven times in the back while his three kids screamed from the back of his car. And so my twin boys saw that footage too.

And my son Walker, he ran from the room in tears, screaming, why do they keep trying to kill us? And his brother Marshall followed close behind, also in tears.

I say all this, and I share this in the book really because I wanted to try to find a way to buoy the kids, that was really it. And so I began to think about like, well, what kind of story could I tell them? What kind of story could Sonia tell them as well?

And we settled on a family project that very quickly became my next book project. And it was those 10 weeks in 1963.

Not just because what happened in those 10 weeks forever changed the trajectory of America, but really because we saw in those 10 weeks almost a guide for how our kids could lead their lives, how they could lead it with courage, how they could persevere, the ingenuity that it took to win across those 10 weeks.

And it's kind of like above all, the hope that they would have to have in their own lives. That's why I wrote this book. That's why the book is dedicated to the kids. And really it's meant not just for them, but really anybody who in the past few years has experienced a bit of hopelessness.

What you're talking about, it seems, really is embodied in the title: You Have To Be Prepared To Die Before You Can Begin To Live. Talk about where that comes from and what that message means.

Yeah, so there is both a literal and a metaphoric interpretation of that. So let's deal first with just how, who said it.

Fred Shuttlesworth was a Birmingham pastor and one of the key protagonists in this book. 

I believe today that Fred Shuttlesworth should be as well-known as Martin Luther King. 

He was known back in the 1960s as the bravest civil rights leader and fighter during the whole of the movement. King himself called Shuttlesworth that.

Fred was a pastor in Birmingham and a civil rights leader at a time when it was very, very dangerous to be a civil rights leader. Before King or anybody else was in Birmingham, there was Fred Shuttlesworth.

And I think maybe for your audience, it might be important to understand the quote. We perhaps have to just take a quick second to understand the context of Birmingham at that time.

As King and the rest are coming down there, Birmingham is a place that castrated Black men as a way to try to intimidate Shuttlesworth and other SCLC leaders from actually staging a civil rights campaign in Birmingham. Birmingham was a place where cops raped Black women in their patrol cars. Birmingham was a place where CBS's Edward R. Murrow, who was reporting from Birmingham prior to this campaign, colloquially known as Project Confrontation, he's down there. 

And at one point, Edward R. Murrow turns to his producer, doing his own story about what Birmingham is actually like and says not only is it the most racist, most violent city he's ever visited in America, but there is no place like this that he has ever seen since Nazi Germany.

So that's Birmingham, Alabama in 1963.

And to bring it back to Fred, long before King was trying to stage civil rights campaigns there in Birmingham, Shuttlesworth was doing that. Sometimes literally on his own.

His home was bombed. He stood in front of buses, literally stood in front of moving buses that refused to integrate.He was on multiple occasions, nearly beaten to death by Bull Connor, who was the public safety commissioner and effectively the head of the police department and kind of the villain of this story, because he was truly evil in real life.

And just prior to the launch of this civil rights campaign in the spring of 1963, which again, colloquially known as Project Confrontation, just prior to this launch, King and the rest go to New York to have a fundraiser there with Harry Belafonte in Harry Belafonte's apartment.

And Fred just starts to basically tell stories about his life. And the deep-pocketed New Yorkers who were there that night to try to raise money for this campaign, they're just kind of in awe.

And we don't know exactly what's asked, but we do know that basically the question posed to Fred was like, how do you endure? How have you done this for years, sometimes single-handedly? Again, a place basically like Nazi Germany. How have you done this?

And Fred looked at the crowd and he said, you have to be prepared to die before you can begin to live. And he meant that quite literally.

One time Fred tried to enlist his daughters in an all-white high school. And he told Bull Connor he was going to go to try to enlist them. And so as he arrives at the high school, he's met by eight to 10 white men with brass knuckles and lead pipes and chains. And he is nearly beaten to death.

His wife, Ruby, is stabbed in her lower back. She's rushed to the hospital. Fred somehow escapes. And that afternoon he checks himself out of the hospital because he had a civil rights meeting that night.

And when he appeared at the civil rights meeting, almost all of the skin was scraped off his face from what he had endured that afternoon. But he said, I'm going to be here. I'm here for the duration, however long it takes to have equality.

So when Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth says, “you have to be prepared to die before you can begin to live,” that's kind of what he means. He was willing to risk his life so that he might at last fully appreciate life, provide a better life for himself and his family.

But if I could go just a beat more on this, Shuttlesworth was like so many other leaders that spring in Birmingham, a pastor. And he read a great deal of the Bible. And I think if you have to be prepared to die before you can begin to live is also in some sense a resurrection story.

I don't mean that necessarily by way of Jesus and the resurrection. What I mean instead is that Fred understood the metaphor of the resurrection story.

Sometimes to truly lead the life you are destined to, you have to be willing to die. And that death can be a metaphoric death. It can mean moving beyond who you currently are to embrace the possibility of who you might become. And that who you might become might be so good, might be so great, that generations of people may benefit from it.

And I think that's also what he meant when he said, you have to be prepared to die before you can begin to live.

And there's a direct connection between that statement. And I guess one would say the moral heart of this book in the use of nonviolence–maybe not the moral heart, the strategic heart.

Yeah, it's kind of in some sense, I don't think that's a slip up. I think it's kind of both. It's like a moral and a strategic heart, yeah.

So talk about that because this is something, I mean, I think we all know that the Civil Rights Movement with Martin Luther King and the others was dedicated to the principles of nonviolence. King was inspired by Mahatma Gandhi in India.

But I don't think many of us understand exactly what that means because nonviolence on its own, even they did not see as effective. What they saw as effective was nonviolence as a way to in fact incite the violence of others and therefore shock the moral conscience of the country.

Talk about what this means.

That's it, you've hit on it.

And one of the other protagonists in the book is the executive director of the SCLC at the time. His name was Wyatt Walker. 

So for basically the first seven years of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's life, it had been an abject failure. Every campaign that King and his colleagues staged, they lost.

Now, some people may quibble with that who know the Civil Rights Movement really well and say the Montgomery bus boycott received the championing of the Supreme Court. And those buses in Montgomery were desegregated. This was in 1955, 1956.

I would say, and in fact, the historical record would say, by 1963, Black people in Montgomery had returned to riding in the back of the bus in large measure because of the intransigence of the Klan in Montgomery and frankly, the intransigence of the Alabama government.

So again, across basically the first seven years of the SCLC's life, abject failure.

The idea of nonviolence, they began to realize, can only work when you go to the site of violence. When you go to a place like Birmingham, which was less a city than frankly, a site of domestic terror, there were more than 50 bombs in the post-war era between the 1940s and late 1960s in Birmingham that went, quote, unsolved. These were bombings that took place in predominant Black homes in Birmingham, in predominant Black businesses. And it was almost assuredly done by the Ku Klux Klan and their barely cloaked colleagues in the Birmingham Police Department. And of course, any other sort of associate group that might be affiliated with either of those two.

So rather than run from a place like Birmingham, Walker said, let us go to the very site of terror and anger every terrible person there. And that was the plan in Birmingham.

Now, to do that–and this was something that I didn't appreciate until I began really the research of this book–there was almost this psychological warfare that's going on between the SCLC and Bull Connor and his cops.

I guess another way to put it would be almost like a cat and mouse game where the SCLC was trying, incite is not necessarily the right word, but we're trying to basically get Bull [Connor] to respond the way that they knew that he wanted to, which was with extreme violence, extreme hatred.

He'd been doing it for more than a generation as a public safety commissioner and elected official in Birmingham.

And a lot of the book is trying to figure out how can we get Bull to come to these protests that we're waging? How can we take away the options that Bull has so that the only option left to him is one where he would respond with violence?

And then how can we make sure if and when he does respond with violence, that say a reporter from the New York Times is scribbling notes or a camera crew is filming footage that'll later that night make its way on Walter Cronkite's broadcast. How can we make sure that's going to happen?

And that was the sort of psychological warfare, psychological games that were happening beneath all of these daily protests that were happening in Birmingham. 

And it wasn't that easy. I mean, I bet a lot of listeners right now are thinking, well, if Bull Connor was such a brute, and he was, then why was it so difficult to get him to respond that way?

In large measure because Bull had been, in some way, coached and trained by other law enforcement officials in the South in the same manner that the SCLC tried to coach and train any volunteer that tried to sign up for its nonviolence.

In Bull's case, he heard from officials in Albany, Georgia, where the SCLC had staged a campaign one year prior in 1962. And from these law enforcement officials, Bull learns that if he just does as those officials in Albany did, which is to arrest the pastors kneeling at their feet, almost with unctuous care, as if the law enforcement officials are praying themselves, if Bull is as gentle as possible when arresting all these people, and if he can train his cops to be as gentle as possible when arresting all these people, then the SCLC won't be able to fight back because, again, they're trained in nonviolence, But more importantly, the national press, which has been gathered to watch this, quote, “spectacle,” this bloody violence that Wyatt Walker has promised, they're going to grow bored, they're going to grow hostile toward the SCLC, and they're going to leave.

And for a very long time during project confrontation, that is pretty much exactly what happens.

Bull is very careful. He knows that he cannot respond the way he wants to.

And so he, and again, his very violent, very racist white police officers within his force do everything they can to make sure that they use no excess force against the SCLC.

And yet at the same time, the Black community was realistic about the kind of violence that they would face with this movement. And in fact, there was a lot of resistance from the Black community, including the clergy and business leaders, to the SCLC coming in.

I mean, even though Fred Shuttlesworth was one of their own, Martin Luther King and others of the SCLC were outsiders, quote unquote.

Outside agitators, yep. 

Outside agitators, exactly. I remember the use of that phrase very well. So how did that change? What happened to get them on board?

Well, maybe the first thing to say is that when we think of the civil rights movement today, we tend to think of it along two lines:that there was a natural progression to how things unfolded and success begat success. And then secondly, that they acted almost as a monolith.

And as we were just saying a minute ago, success did not begat success. In fact, for the first seven years of that campaign, it was nothing. The first seven years of that movement, it was nothing but failure for the SCLC.

But more specifically to your question, we have to bear in mind that somebody like King who comes in from Atlanta with a whole bunch of other people from Atlanta, like Ralph Abernathy, who was King's best friend, like Wyatt Walker, who again was the executive director of the SCLC, when they come in, Black Birminghamians see them as people who want to protest here, want to try to help Black Birminghamians. And there is a sort of patronizing air and a sneer to that sort of help. 

James Bevel, who was another senior executive within the SCLC at that time, and again, another protagonist within this book, he was quick to notice how the fault of Wyatt Walker's thinking was that, not until Wyatt Walker declared Birmingham as his next site for a campaign, not until then did any Birminghamian have any sense that he or she would want freedom.

And James Bevel said, that's an absolutely ridiculous notion. They had been fighting for freedom just as long as anybody else, but they were fighting in a far more harsher place than anybody else.

And so for King and the rest to come in and say, no, no, no, do it our way, we know how to do it.

Again, it was something really patronizing about that that they didn't appreciate. So that's a big part of why the Black Baptist pastors with whom King was supposed to align in Birmingham did not want to align.

But there were other reasons too. A lot of Black Birminghamians, frankly, Black and white Birminghamians thought that the problems of Birmingham should be solved by the people of Birmingham, that King and the rest were not necessary.

And then there was a third problem, which was, and this is something that King and Wyatt Walker in particular did not realize for a very long time. They thought that all of these adults would be willing to protest alongside King because King was growing, at least on the national stage, into the almost mythic King, the way that history remembers him today. And they thought just because of that sort of public persona people would want to follow behind.

But the reality was almost all of Black Birmingham were employed by white people. About 50% of Black Birmingham were domestic workers whose bosses were often rich people in Birmingham or frankly, even richer people in the Birmingham suburb of Mountain Brook.

And even those who were the professional class and even up into the upper class of Black Birmingham to the extent it had one, this would be predominantly teachers and a few lawyers.

A lawyer, he could risk disbarment from some judge for stepping out and protesting, or if he was employed in any way by anybody that had a partner in the firm that was white, if he was working at a white law firm, forget it, right?

Now, same thing goes with teachers. The superintendent of Birmingham schools at that time was white and he strictly forbade any teacher from marching.

And so the sentiment that built across the first month or so of that campaign was, well, great, if I protest alongside you, King, I may be beaten, I may be beaten even for beliefs that I have and for a future that I want my kids to have, a better future that I want my kids to have, excuse me, but after you leave town, I'm gonna be unemployed. And where's that gonna leave me then?

And so they didn't want to protest because it would mean their jobs if they did. 

And that becomes a real crucial propulsion to the twist in this story. So before we get to that twist in the story, let's talk about the Good Friday March because it was the first march, in fact, that King himself attended. Why hadn't he marched before? I mean, after all, other people were putting their lives on the line, even if there weren't that many of them, as many as they had hoped. So why hadn't he marched and what made the difference here?

Why hadn't he marched? We can honestly, from the vantage point of 60 years on, only speculate.Some of that speculation includes that the first few weeks of the campaign were such an abysmal failure that if King would have put himself out in front of a march where only literally like three or four people followed behind him, it would risk his own reputation. So there was this political slash optical reason why King had not yet marched.

There were also reasons just frankly having to do with, you know, some of his closest aides would later say that Martin was the most indecisive leader they have ever met in their lives.

And maybe for no other reason than he thought now is not yet the time or I want to put other people out there first, like my brother, his brother A.D. King lived in Birmingham and he thought, well, maybe what will happen if A.D. goes before I do?

We have only speculation to rely on, which is kind of remarkable because King wrote extensively about the Birmingham campaign and gave numerous interviews around the Birmingham campaign. But one thing he never fully delved into was, well, wait, why exactly was it that you chose not to do anything until the Good Friday march?

But we do know that he chose to do nothing until the Good Friday march.

Okay, so what is happening during that Good Friday march? Well, here's where it's kind of fascinating. King says the campaign is getting worse and worse, fewer and fewer people are going to protest.

And so King and his sort of senior team decide, okay, well, maybe to try to buoy the numbers of people who are gonna participate, I should be the one to lead the march on Good Friday. There's some symbolic value in that, again, a resurrection story in and of itself there.

And as he's making these public statements, Bull Connor, who remains pretty wily at this point in time, says effectively, if you want to march, King, go ahead, but I am going to not allow you to use any bail bondsmen in this city.

And so what that meant was that the bail that the SCLC had thus far relied on to get its few jailed protesters out of jail, the SCLC would no longer have access to that, which means that it would basically have to pay the full freight. And Bull Connor then upped how much it would cost anybody to go to jail to exorbitant sums. 

And so this really just, literally hours before the Good Friday march put King in a real bind. 

And he did not know if he should march, because here's why, and I can understand this indecision at this point in time.

If he marches, Francesca, he risks being in prison, excuse me, in jail. He risked being in the Birmingham City jail for six months. That is more than enough time to ruin Project Confrontation and the Birmingham campaign, and perhaps ruin the SCLC as well. If he chooses not to march, the press is going to ridicule him for his flip-flop. 

On Wednesday of that Good Friday week, he said he made a big public announcement, I'm going to march. By the following day, Thursday, he's thinking about equivocating and going back against his word. If he marches, everybody that marches alongside him will not only be imprisoned for up to six months, but if they try to free any of those protesters, it will bankrupt the SCLC. The efforts to get everybody out of jail will bankrupt the SCLC.

But if he doesn't march, and if he goes to try to stage some sort of fundraiser at maybe Harry Belafonte's apartment back in New York, he's going to lose the sort of political capital that he desperately needs, not only from Black Birminghamians, but basically everybody throughout the country. He's going to be seen as the guy who's going to follow the leader who can't follow his own words.

That was one of the things that he heard as he was debating what to do. And so he has this great moment of crisis. And I'll save some of exactly what happens for readers of the book itself.

But what I will say is that he has a moment of clarity thanks to a deep amount of reflection and prayer. And he feels that God is telling him that he has to march.

And so he goes back into the Gaston Motel and he tells all of his executives, “I need to march.” 

And even King's own father, Martin Luther King, Sr., says, “I don't think you should march today.

I think this is a terrible idea.”

And he says, “I'm going to march, whether it means I'm marching by myself, I have to do this.”

And later, there are other civil rights leaders who were there in that room that day, among them Andrew Young, who will play an outsized role in the civil rights movement in the years after 1963.

But Young and others say that that moment, hours before the Good Friday march, was the emergence for the first time of King's, quote, “true leadership.” That's when he really stepped into who he would ultimately be. And it was in Birmingham on Good Friday in 1963.

And I love that story in part because it echoes back to what we talked about earlier. King had to let go of who he had been. He had to die so that he might attempt to live. And this new King that emerges is one that just inspires everybody around him, first in the Gaston Motel where they're staying, and ultimately on the streets in Birmingham when he marches on Good Friday.

And then later, in the incredible letter that he wrote from the Birmingham jail. Do you want to say a little bit about that before we move on to The Children's Crusade? And I just have to say for our listeners, this is like fly on the wall. I mean, this is such a fantastically written book. It's absolutely spellbinding. And I actually listened to the audio version, which was wonderful as well.

Yeah, I was so pleased with the voice actor that we ended up settling on. We did an interview with him and he was just fantastic. So I'm very pleased to hear you say that, Francesca, because I thought he did a wonderful job.

What I will say about that letter is that to me, it is in some measure, the most fascinating aspect of King's life that I've ever encountered. Because in that letter is really a 15 year intellectual trek for King to arrive at who he wants to be in this life going forward. And it involves everybody from Christian theologians like Walter Rauschenbusch and Reinhold Niebuhr. It involves Tolstoy, it involves Gandhi, it involves Napoleon, it involves Socrates, it involves Jesus.

I tried to weave in how King arrived at his worldview in that Birmingham jail, writing with this nubby nub of a pencil that he'd basically been able to pilfer into his isolation cell. And I feel that hopefully when people read that book, they'll begin to understand not only the majesty of what he wrote in that letter, but really also the inner workings of his mind and why he wrote it the way he did.

I think that that letter is in some sense, to go back to this idea of the origin story of America, if 1963 is truly our origin story, then that is the letter from Birmingham jail is our founding document.

And so you mentioned before that probably the major reason why the marches were so poorly attended was because people were afraid for their livelihoods. So was it Shuttlesworth or Bevel, I can't remember now, who decided, who figured out the way out of this dilemma?

It would be James Bevel.

So James Bevel is the protagonist of this book that we haven't yet really discussed. 

There are four, there's Wyatt Walker, the executive director, there's Fred Shuttlesworth, there's King, and then there's James Bevel.

James Bevel's a little bit younger than everybody else, James Bevel's in his 20s. James Bevel is from a small town in Mississippi, Itta Bena, Mississippi. 

James Bevel is far and away the most idiosyncratic leader within the civil rights movement. He wears country bibs because as he said, country bibs bore no heirs in his native Mississippi. He put a yarmulke on his head because he saw himself as half Jewish. There's no real indication that he might actually have had Jewish forebears, but he still saw himself as half Jewish. And Old Testament prophets inspired him. Their strength summoned his own, he said.

James Bevel was a man who spoke in absolutes and almost with like an Old Testament sort of fervor, he would say things like, "'Thus saith the Lord,' said James Bevel." 

But his ideas were so progressive that so many other leaders in the civil rights movement couldn't even keep up with him because they were so far out there. And perhaps there was no idea as far out there as what he proposed to King in mid-April of 1963, when the campaign is completely floundering.

And again, as you were saying, Black adults do not want to, Black Birmingham adults do not want to protest alongside King and the rest from Atlanta. 

He said, well, if they don't want to, Bevel said, if they don't want to protest because they're worried about losing their jobs or they're worried about what might happen to their bodies, there's one group of people that I think would protest.

And King's like, “who's that?”

And Bevel said, we should have kids lead the marches.

And everybody was shocked.

But Bevel, Bevel again, he's a really idiosyncratic guy. What he had done is he had gone to various high schools. He's a lot younger than the rest of the SCLC. Remember, all of those guys were like middle-aged. Bevel's in his mid to late twenties in 1963. So he's not too much older than the oldest high school student.

King wasn't so young, was he? 

No, he would have been in his, I think he would have been 34 thereabouts. So he's a few years older. But to high school students, 34 and wearing this sort of, the suit that was the civil rights movement suit, right? That sort of classic dark suit with the white shirt and the dark tie, often, you know, Black on white or blue on white, whatever it may be. You know, King might as well have been 55 years old, you know, 65 years old for these high school kids.

But somebody like James Bevel, with that yarmulke on his head, with those country bibs on, they were like, who is this James Bevel guy?

And so he started to meet with them. 

And the more James Bevel met with these high school students, the more he told them about the fact that they were getting discards, say, for their school supplies from white high schools.

Their football equipment was discarded. These Black kids had never heard anything like this before.

“But James,” they were like, “is that actually the way that it's happening in Birmingham?” 

And they began to fall in line behind him.

And so eventually he began to recruit more and more people to this movement that everybody remained absolutely against, which was to put kids on the front lines and go up against, again, Bull Connor, who, if we need to repeat it, a man who knows from Nazis, Edward R. 

Murrow, says that Bull Connor and his cops were basically the same thing as what he saw in Nazi Germany.

And King and the rest were like, there's no way we're gonna put these kids on the front lines.

But Bevel was adamant.

And ultimately, it goes from him having a few dozen people to a few hundred. And he's recruiting them by means that still almost give me chills. 

One time, he takes these group of kids to literally show them the lines of segregation, separating Black Birmingham from white Birmingham. Because a lot of times these kids' parents had parents who wanted to protect them from the brutality with which the adults live, right? 

So they kept them in their neighborhoods.

A lot of times kids, when I was reading the oral histories or talking with the kids who are now very old adults, they would tell stories about how their lives were basically like their school, their church, and their home. And those three things could be like maybe within a two to three block radius. And that's all they knew.

And here comes Bevel and he's gonna lead them out of their neighborhood and he's gonna lead them even into white Birmingham.

And one day he leads them beyond that to a cemetery. And he says, look around kids, and they do. And there may be four or five deep looking around him. And he says, in 40 years, you're all gonna be here. And then he says, now what are you gonna do while you're alive?

And that just, wow, those kids loved that. Nobody talked the way that James Bevel did.

And so he said, you can do something right now. You can right a wrong that has existed for you and your parents and your grandparents before you all the way back to slavery. And you can do something right now for yourself and your kids and your grandkids all the way into the future.

And all it takes is for you to have the courage to stand up and say, I don't care how many times I'm beaten or knocked down. I'm only going to get up again. And I am going to fight for my freedom by showing that I can basically turn my body into a vessel of courage and suffering. 

Regardless of how many times I get knocked down, I'm not gonna fight back. And by not fighting back, I'm going to show that I'm the bigger person.

And by the tens and then scores and then hundreds and ultimately thousands, all of these kids fall in line behind James Bevel. 

Until the campaign is so anemic from adults where it gets to the point where not only do people quit protesting, but this is even more alarming to King, the press leaves. The New York Times sends its reporter in Birmingham to other locales throughout the South because there's nothing to even report on anymore in Birmingham.

So King is at the point where he's like, well, gosh, we've got to consider something. And that's when James Bevel says, we will have the kids lead. And King doesn't so much accede as basically chooses to not decide.

And so James Bevel decides for himself and he says, in early May, we're going to stage something known as D-Day. That war language was very much intentional because they realized what might happen once they actually walked out of those church doors and tried to march into the phalanx of cops that Bull Connor had ordered.

So they were ready. And that's what happened. That was the children's campaign of May in 1963.

So that brings us back to May 3rd, 1963 and the photograph that got this whole story going.

And I guess I wanted to ask you, because this also brings it back to your kids. I mean, I was reading this part of your book, Paul Kix, and I was agonizing, myself. I mean, as a parent and a grandparent, actually, I was thinking, gee, I mean, what would I do? It seems immoral to let your kids be exposed to that kind of danger. And yet it seems immoral to stop them. And how did you think about that as you were writing about this?

Very much along similar lines. And that sort of moral dilemma is what I wanted to be at the heart of those chapters.

Because what I will say about them is whatever image you have of, say, grainy PBS documentaries where you see the fire hoses come out and you see the kids kind of recoil, and maybe you see some of the unleashed German Shepherds attacking, whatever you think that is, realize that it was far, far, far worse than that.

There were reporters there who had, say, served in units alongside Marines. And they said nothing distressed them or frightened them the way that Double D Day, May 3rd, 1963 did in Birmingham, Alabama. They'd never seen images like they saw in Birmingham. The sort of moral decay and disorder and chaos of that day.

And here's the thing. It wasn't like it was just the SCLC having kids walk out of 16th Street Baptist Church and right across the street into Kelly Ingram Park where all of Bull Connor and his troops were, and the fire hoses as well. It wasn't just that.

And it wasn't just the fact that the press was recording it. But to bring it back to your question of how did parents respond, Francesca, they were there that day. A lot of times they were lining the outsides of the street because they were worried about what might happen if their kids actually protested.

And what happened? 

Well, kids were back flipped in the air. The force of the water was so strong. I mean, there were kids who were torn like rag dolls as their necks were in the mouths of German shepherds. It was brutal, brutal stuff.

And the parents, it's really, really a tough question to have to field. How do you feel about that?

And it was made even more sort of morally complicated by Wyatt Walker. Because Wyatt Walker, as executive director of the SCLC, he decides to blow dog whistles that day. Have people in the SCLC blow them as loud as they possibly can. He wanted to incite the dogs even further.

Why?

Because if he did that, then maybe, just maybe, he could show how this violence visited upon all these Black kids was in some way a metaphor of the Black experience in America dating all the way back to the first slave ships arriving.

And the difference was now it was being recorded by television crews that would broadcast it through the nation in more or less real time, right?

That campaign, that day's campaign happened in the afternoon. By that night, it's on the national news. It had never appeared that quickly and with such visceral violence.

And Wyatt Walker knew that if he could have those sort of images reach America, perhaps it can reach as well the conscience of America and in particular, the attorney general and president sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. That was his real aim the entire time.

But to do it, again, there's that, what is that moral line? I say in the book, this was a bitch of a line to draw on America's dust, Double D Day. And man, they drew that line and they walked across it.

Now, we talked about Bull Connor resisting the push, the temptation of violence, but he broke with the Children's Crusade. Why?

He did. 

He broke in large measure because as soon as the kids started to protest just prior to Double D Day, the day in question that we're talking about, they had effectively filled the jails because there were so many hundreds, if not thousands of kids who wanted to protest because they had been galvanized by James Bevel.

So by the time Double D Day arrives, Bull Connor gets to that point that we talked about earlier.

The SCLC had effectively stripped Bull of all options.

He can either accede to these Black protesters, these kids, and grant them the authority they want, which was to desegregate Birmingham, to desegregate the most segregated place in America, or because there's nowhere else to put kids, because he can't put any more kids in the jails, because the jails are full, his only other option is to unleash the sort of violence that he'd always wanted to unleash anyway. And he chose the latter that day. 

So one question I have is, it worked then, but could it work now?

Yes. 

And do you feel that this does leave your kids with a message of hope?

Yes, I do, because I think that the message of nonviolence is first and foremost a message of courage. People seem to equate nonviolence with timidity. That is, it's the furthest thing from timid. You have to be so strong and so courageous to say that regardless of what may happen to me, I will not fight back.

And you also have to be so patient and have so much perseverance and such sort of resolve of soul to say, not only regardless of what will happen to me, I will not fight back, but I will continue to show up day after week after month.

And we know that it can work because it worked for Gandhi in India. King was overwhelmingly inspired by Gandhi's nonviolent push in India, beginning with assault march to the sea in 1930 and extending through Indian independence in the 1940s. And King thought that it could work in his life, and it did.

And just to show what happened that spring, let's actually [have] a very brief history lesson.

In 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation is signed. And almost immediately after the Civil War, what happens instead is a new form of segregation. 

It's in some ways just as violent and awful as the old form, lynchings, people's houses burned, terrorism, castration. And it's also an economic one.

The Jim Crow South that would reign for 100 years was total through the South. And it was actually moving farther and farther into the North by 1963. So for 100 years, there was no equality from 1863 to 1963.

In 1963, something happens, and that something is the Birmingham Campaign.

And then in the summer, early summer of 1963, on June 11th, John F. Kennedy, alongside his brother, Bobby, they helped to write and then ultimately present a national address where Kennedy does the thing he said he would never do. He did not want to sponsor civil rights legislation, but what had happened in Birmingham forced him to. He saw there was a moral need for civil rights legislation as a result. So that was his argument. There was a moral need for civil rights legislation to at last end Jim Crow.

That message becomes the following spring in 1964, the Civil Rights Act. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 becomes the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In 1968, King dies, but I think there's a new life for his country. And I think it's not just Shirley Chisholm's presidential bid in 1972. I don't think it's just the rise of the Black middle and upper class throughout the latter half of the 20th century.I don't think even that it's just Barack Obama's presidency beginning in 2008. 

What I really think is it's felt, 1963 is felt at a far more granular level. It's my ability to marry Sonia in a former Jim Crow state like Texas, and for us to together raise our three kids where nobody harasses us for who we are. That's the real impact of 1963.

And I want my kids, just as I want your audience to understand that it's time that we really understand and grapple with that origin story of America. What happened in 1963? That's why I wrote this book.

Because for all of the civil rights canon, and it is as vast as perhaps any in American letters, there was no book that just dealt with those 10 weeks in Birmingham, and then how they changed America. And I was like, that's the book that I want to write.

And we are so glad you did, because the job is not finished. The backsliding and backlash and whitelash is happening.

Yep.

And the kind of courage that you show us happened in this book is the inspiration we need to go forward.

Oh, thank you, Francesca, I really appreciate that.