Carry Me Home : Birmingham,
Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the
Civil Rights Revolution by Diane
McWhorter
Great
The Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863, but a contemporary
African American saying predicted that freedom would come only after
another hundred years of struggle. That prediction was about right: the
civil rights struggle erupted in the middle of the 20th century, with its
violent epicenter in the industrial city of Birmingham, Alabama. There
freedom riders and voter-rights activists faced down Klansmen and Nazis,
who had put aside their own differences to cast a pall of terror--and the
smoke of a well-orchestrated campaign of church bombings--over the
South. Diane McWhorter, a journalist and native Alabamian, offers a
comprehensive, literate record of the struggle that covers more than half a
century and that involves hundreds of major actors. Her work is solidly
researched and highly readable, and it offers much new information.

Among the many newsworthy aspects of the book are McWhorters
discussions of internal power struggles within the civil rights movement,
the uneasy role of Birminghams small Jewish population, and the
collusion of local government--especially swaggering Police
Commissioner Bull Connor. The author also addresses the segregationist
and white-supremacist movements and recounts the tortuous quest to
bring the church bombers to justice, which was finally accomplished in
2000. Carry Me Home is a worthy and highly recommended companion to
Taylor Branchs Parting the Waters and Andrew Youngs An Easy Burden.
--Gregory McNamee
Personal Review: Carry Me Home : Birmingham, Alabama: The
Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution by Diane
McWhorter
This is simply a necessary book for anyone who wants to understand the
Civil Rights Movement, the city of Birmingham, Alabama, the relations
between big business and racism and fascism in this society, and
Amercian politics , not only in the historical period covered by the book, but
in general. The significant weakness of this book is that McWhorter's
focus is chiefly on two groups of while people: Birmingham's industrial and
commercial ruling class and the variety of fascists, racists, and terrorists
that they employed to maintain the dominant order.
While she does document enough about the civil rights movement in
Alabama to make the book understandable, she has little concern for how
the lives of everyday Black people in Birmingham were changed by what
she talks about. Moreover, McWhorter focuses not on the issue of real
integration of the life of Birmingham, but on the formal agreements
between white business leaders and the civil rights movement in 1963 and
early 1964, which even at the time that her book closes were not being
carried out by the white business leaders and the local governments. So
we are left at the end of the book curious as to how de facto desegregation
took place. Of course, no American city, including Birmingham, has been
truly desegregated in regard to housing, employment, and schools.
McWhorter gives a good picture about how big Northern-owned industry
that dominated Birmingham economically and politically was responsible
for the severe racism of the city. She shows how big business nourished
the Klan and other violent organizations against Black people, during its
battles with workers trying to unionize steel, coal, and other industries
starting at the turn of the century.
The lineage of the fascist and Klan groups fed by the big business leaders
during those years continued in the series of murders and bombings that
shook Birmingham in the 1950s, and led to down to the individuals who
bombed the 16th St. Baptist Church in 1963. For example, Hitler-loving
fascist and antiSemite, Ace Carter who began in the 1930s became one of
George Wallace's main speech writers in the 1960s.

That is the important part of this book: Southern racism was at the
service of big capitalism nationally, not a product of something Southern,
but something capitalist.
McWhorter shows how the power structure in the 1950s and 1960s
resisted the civil rights movement, came to support the renewed racism
represented by George Wallace, and had long before put Bull Connor into
a position where his job as police commission largely involved coordinating
terorism against Black people along with the Klan and neo-nazis.
She also does picture the civil rights movement in Birmingham starting
with the movements that began as part of the labor radicalism in the 1930s
and 1940s. She is best when she is talking about the tension between
Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a militant Birmingham leader who eventually
moved to Cincinatti but continued to function in Birmingham's movement,
and more conservative leaders like Martin Luther King.
Toward the end, she notes that the rebellions that met Birmingham's police
after the bombings in the 1960s, though condemned by the civil rights
leaders, had a very strong impact on creating the fear that brought about
concessions.
She does note that the Kennedy administration considered all direct action
civil rights activities, like the marches that force Birmingham's rulers to
make concessions, "poorly timed."
McWhorter overglorifies the white business leaders who made small
concessions on integrating lunch counters and dressing rooms in stores,
and hiring a few black clerks in the stores and other demands is a bit
disconcerting. She tends to picture them as leaders in the effort to create
integration, as opposed to the last guard of realistic resistance against real
Black rights. Moreover, history, and even she shows that they backed off
from their agreements for years. Again, it would have been more
satisfying if she discussed how these and other concessions were won in
the years after her book closes.
McWhorter has a fascination with historical and personal details of
members of the white elite. We find out who was whose cousin, who was
at whose wedding, who did what in 1920, 1930, 1940, 1957, and she
presents hundreds of individuals and their details. Sometimes, she gets
carried away and her details don't really contribute to understanding the
central theme of the book, the civil rights battles in Birmingham.
Unfortunately, true after the 1963 Church bombing McWhorter
concentrates almost totally on the details of the Klan and fascist terrorists
suspected of the bombing, while leaving out what happened in Birmingham
or the civil rights movement.

The civil rights movement in Birmingham did not end in 1963. Many of its
battles remain to be fought there and throughout the country. With all of its
weaknesses, Carry Me Home helps us understand the fight then and the
fight now.
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