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You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live : Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America

You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live : Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America

Paul Kix

On Sale Date: January 7, 2025

Regular price $19.99 USD
Regular price Sale price $19.99 USD
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From reporter Paul Kix, the riveting story, never before fully told, of the 1963 Birmingham Campaign–ten weeks that would shape the course of the Civil Rights Movement and the future of America.

It’s one of the iconic photographs of American history: A Black teenager, a policeman and his lunging German Shepherd. Birmingham, Alabama, May of 1963. In May of 2020, as reporter Paul Kix stared at a different photo–that of a Minneapolis police officer suffocating George Floyd–he kept returning to the other photo taken half a century earlier, haunted by its echoes. What, Kix wondered, was the full legacy of the Birmingham photo? And of the campaign it stemmed from?

In You Have To Be Prepared To Die Before You Can Begin To Live, Paul Kix takes the reader behind the scenes as he tells the story of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s pivotal, 10 week campaign in 1963 to end segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. At the same time, he also provides a window into the minds of the four extraordinary men who led the campaign—Martin Luther King, Jr, Walker Wyatt, Fred Shuttlesworth, and James Bevel. With page-turning prose that read like a thriller, Kix’s book is the first to zero in on the ten weeks of Project C, as it was known—its specific history and its echoes sounding throughout our culture now. It’s about Where It All Began, for sure, but it’s also the key to understanding Where We Are Now and Where We Will Be. As the BLM era of American history begins to bear fruit, Project C is crucial to our understanding of our own time and the impact that strategic activism can have.

 

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