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., Wyatt Walker, 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 fight
for equality continues on many fronts, Project C is crucial to our
understanding of our own time and the impact that strategic activism can
have
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