By Paul Kix
Celadon Books, a division of Macmillan 2023
Reviewed by Steve Halpern
There have been many books written about the civil rights movement. For me, Paul Kix’ book You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live is as good as any of them. What makes this book special?
Kix wrote about the intense drama surrounding ten weeks in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. In his depiction of those ten weeks, Kix gave incisive biographies of all the leaders who contributed to the unfolding battles in that city.
Clearly there are limitations to this book. In my opinion, the information presented by Kix greatly outweighs the disagreements I have with some of his conclusions.
The plan
In 1963, 12 to 15 leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) met at the Dorchester Academy, outside of Savanna, Georgia. The topic of this meeting was to discuss how to carry out a campaign to desegregate the city of Birmingham, Alabama.
Up until that point, the civil rights movement wasn’t having much success. The Supreme Court ruled in their Brown v. Board of Education Topeka decision that discrimination in the funding of education was illegal. However, gross disparities in the funding of education continued, as they do to this day.
The 385-day Montgomery Bus Boycott prompted a court decision that formally allowed Black people to sit anywhere they wanted on buses. However, in practice very little had changed since the boycott.
There was a desegregation campaign in Albany, Georgia that was unable to make any significant changes. However, those assembled at the Dorchester Academy were determined that Birmingham, Alabama would be different.
A detailed plan was laid out by Wyatt Walker who was a college educated pastor and had served in the military. The plan appeared to be foolproof to those assembled. However, James Bevel didn’t like it.
Bevel had been raised on a farm in a small town in Mississippi. His father, Dennis Bevel, lost his farm because he refused to report on his Black neighbors to the FBI. Then Dennis Bevel became a sharecropper in Itta Bena, Mississippi.
His father introduced James Bevel to religious writings and they both considered themselves half-Jewish. Unlike the other members of SCLC, James Bevel dressed in overalls and wore a Yarmelke.
Bevel spoke to Martin Luther King about his reservations concerning Wyatt Walker’s plan. He argued that SCLC members needed to get acquainted with the Black community of Birmingham to become a part of their struggle for liberation. Walker’s plan would appear to be imposed from outsiders.
In the military soldiers are required to follow orders or face a court-martial. In a liberation struggle, people need to choose to take substantial risks so they might have a chance to live profoundly better lives.
For the Black people of Birmingham to be convinced to take those risks, Bevel believed that the members of SCLC needed to understand who they would be dealing with. However, Martin Luther King and the rest of those assembled rejected Bevel’s approach.
The enemy
About 100 years before the battle of Birmingham, President Abraham Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address. This speech commemorated those who gave their lives in the war against the slave owners. In that speech Lincoln recited the famous words that the Union soldiers who lost their lives in the Gettysburg battle, “did not die in vain.”
In the aftermath of the war, the federal government passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution that claimed to abolish slavery, establish “equal protection under the law”, as well as voting rights for all male citizens. For the first time in the history of this country largely democratic governments with Black representatives controlled the former slave states.
Then around the year 1877 federal troops left those states. Northern capitalists and government officials agreed that the forces in support of the Ku Klux Klan would now run the former slave states. As a result, Black people lost all citizenship rights, and all branches of the federal government supported these flagrant violations of the Constitution.
The new power brokers in the South adopted laws known as Jim Crow. The apartheid system of South Africa was similar to Jim Crow.
Birmingham, Alabama did not exist during the Civil War. After the war capitalists invested in the construction of the city because of the iron and coal deposits in the surrounding hills.
For many years, there was no pretense of any kind of democracy in Birmingham. The city was a dictatorship run by Eugene “Bull” Connor. The punishment for going against the Bull’s will might be a severe beating or death. Bull Connor rewarded police officers and racist mobs who murdered Black people. His core support was the Ku Klux Klan.
We might consider that the KKK was one of the racist mobs in the world. In Germany there was the group known as the Freikorps, who became the base for the fascist Nazi Party. In czarist Russia the terrorist group known as the Black Hundreds murdered thousands of Jews in the infamous pogroms.
Fred Shuttlesworth was a pastor who lived in Birmingham. For years, it appeared that Shuttlesworth was carrying out a one-person crusade to bring a bit of democracy to the city. His home was one of hundreds that had been bombed. When he attempted to enroll his children in an all-white school, a racist mob mercilessly beat him and stabbed his wife when she attempted to intervene.
Shuttlesworth addressed those assembled at the Dorchester Academy. His words were the title of Paul Kix’ book: “You Have to be prepared to die before you can Begin to live.” Martin Luther King told those who were gathered that one of the consequences of the Birmingham campaign would be that some of those in the meeting might not survive.
The initial problems
The goal of the campaign was to get mass support of Birmingham’s Black community. Using the tactic of non-violent civil disobedience, the plan was to fill the jails with people who violated the Jim Crow laws. The problem was that week after week, few people volunteered to become a part of the campaign.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars had been raised in a fundraiser sponsored by Harry Bellefonte in New York City. Much of the money would be used to bail out people who had been arrested. With few people being arrested, the campaign was at a stalemate.
Bull Connor refused to give permits to any demonstration in the city. So, the police arrested the few people who demonstrated without a permit.
Then the courts got into the action and declared an injunction against demonstrations in the city. This meant that anyone who was arrested might remain in prison for three months instead of an immediate release on bail.
Eventually Martin Luther King decided that he and other leaders of the campaign would violate the injunction. This might mean the possibility of months in prison during the Birmingham campaign. King put on overalls with a denim shirt and went off to get arrested. The prison guards put him in solitary confinement.
During this time white pastors in Birmingham criticized King for challenging Jim Crow. They argued that if he was patient, change would come eventually.
King, writing in the margins of a newspaper and on toilet paper with a worn-out pencil responded to that criticism in depth with his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. These are a few highlights from that letter.
“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”
“Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say ‘Wait.’ But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim”— “then you will understand why we find it difficult to say wait.”
We might also consider that King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail was one of several letters by revolutionaries who served time in prison. The list of those prisoners includes the Cuban revolutionaries José Martí, and Fidel Castro. Others included Mother Jones, and the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky.
A new plan
James Bevel left Birmingham and returned to his home in Mississippi because he felt that the initial desegregation plan was a dead end. When he learned of Martin Luther King’s arrest, he returned to the city with his wife Dianne Nash, who was also a leader of the movement.
Bevel then attempted to understand why there were so few Black people from Birmingham who became a part of the desegregation campaign. He discovered that many Black people were routinely arrested in the city, so there was little fear of arrest. The fear was of employers who would learn of an arrest of an employee for demonstrating in support of civil rights. Black people understood that this would mean a termination from a job that would prevent the worker from providing for his or her family.
Bevel then looked at the young people who were in high school or grammar school. These students were open to the idea of demonstrating and had little to lose. However, there was a problem.
Martin Luther King was opposed to recruiting children to march in demonstrations. He asked the leaders of SCLC what they thought, and they agreed to not expose children to beatings or arrest.
However, James Bevel now was determined to pursue his strategy because he saw how Wyatt Walker’s plan wasn’t working. So, he organized meetings with students where he educated them about the consequences of Jim Crow segregation.
The students were stunned to learn of the full impact of Jim Crow, but their experience corroborated James Bevel’s explanations. They also understood that this discrimination would continue throughout their lives unless there was fundamental change.
The students became enthusiastic about the idea of non-violent disobedience to the Jim Crow laws.
In order to carry out that strategy, Dianne Nash went around the rooms of students and collected their knives, brass knuckles, and other weapons they might use to defend themselves against attacks by vicious police officers.
Eventually, even Wyatt Walker began to see the wisdom of James Bevel’s strategy.
D—Day
James Bevel called May 2 “D—Day.” Just as the allied armies invaded Normandy in the Second World War, the children of Birmingham, Alabama were going to engage in non-violent disobedience to defeat the forces of segregation in the city.
Groups of fifty students marched out of the 16th Street Baptist Church. They were immediately arrested on the orders of Bull Connor. Then for the rest of the day more groups of 50 students marched out of the Church to be arrested. At one point, James Bevel approached Bull Connor and asked if his officers needed a lunch break from being exhausted in the work of arresting hundreds of students.
Then Bull Connor tried to intimidate the students with his canine unit of German Shepherds. He also used powerful water cannons that knocked down the students and ripped off their clothes.
As the jails filled up, Connor sent hundreds of children to a barbed wire open-air fairground that had been used for cattle. Those students lacked food and had no protection from the pouring rain.
However, thousands of students kept coming.
A breaking point
Guy Carawan was a musician who introduced the civil rights movement to the song “We Shall Overcome.” Carawan was white and he attempted to join a civil rights meeting in Birmingham. This was a violation of the Jim Crow laws and Bull Connor ordered his arrest.
There was a spontaneous outrage in the Black community protesting Carawan’s arrest. Adults, who had not been trained in civil disobedience wanted to immediately respond and have a protest demonstration. Wyatt Walker was nervous about supporting that demonstration, but James Bevel insisted, and the demonstration proceeded.
Wyatt Walker chose Charles Billups to lead the demonstration. He was a co-pastor and had not distinguished himself in the movement. However, Billups served time in the military and had been severely beaten by a racist mob.
As the march approached the fire engines and water cannons, the demonstration stopped. The police intercepted photographers of the news media, so whatever happened to the demonstrators would not be recorded in photographs.
Billups marched out in front of the demonstration. He started singing “I want Jesus to walk with me.” The demonstrators joined in.
Captain Evans of the Police Department ordered the demonstrators to disperse.
Charles Billups replied, “We’re not turning back. We haven’t done anything wrong.” “All we want is our freedom.”
Billups knelt to pray and then stood up and said, “Turn on your water! Turn loose your dogs! We will stand here until we die” he shouted those words again and again and thousands repeated those words behind him.
Bull Connor gave the order, “Turn on the hoses.”
When the firemen refused his order Connor shouted, “Dammit! Turn on the hoses.”
The marchers then proceeded unharmed past the police and firemen to continue their peaceful demonstration.
The Kennedy Administration
Paul Kix devoted a section of his book to the evolution of President John F. Kennedy and his brother the Attorney General Robert Kennedy with regards to their relations to the civil rights movement. Kix’ perspective is that both Kennedy’s were initially indifferent or even hostile to the movement. Then, when the Kennedys became sensitized to the issues their attitude was transformed.
I agree that the attitude of the Kennedy Administration changed during the Birmingham campaign. I disagree with the idea that their attitude towards the movement made a fundamental change.
The father of the Kennedy brothers was the capitalist, Joseph Kennedy. He raised his children with a similar attitude as the father of former President Donald Trump. In those atmospheres the essence of life was about winning against capitalist competitors or pro-capitalist politicians. Their attitude towards the working class that creates all wealth was either indifferent or hostile.
The Kennedys decided that their best way to win in politics was to join the Democratic Party. They became friends Joseph McCarthy and supported the House on Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that routinely violated the constitutional rights of anyone who considered themselves communists. Because of that history the Kennedys put pressure on Martin Luther King to disassociate from his lawyers who had supported the Communist Party.
In fact, the Kennedys relied on Democratic Party politicians that ran the Jim Crow system that stripped Black people of their constitutional rights. That support was necessary for John F. Kennedy to win the Presidency in 1960.
For these reasons and others Martin Luther King felt there was little difference between Kennedy and Nixon in the 1960 Presidential elections.
Paul Kix traced the beginning of the change in the attitude of the Kennedys in his chapter "The Gathering At 24 Central Park South." 24 Central Park South was a building owned by Joseph Kennedy where Robert Kennedy had been living.
Sparked by the events in Birmingham, the Attorney General contacted the writer James Baldwin to organize a meeting where Kennedy could get a feel for the Black community’s response to his efforts.
Attending that meeting aside from Baldwin was Lorraine Hansberry, Harry Belafonte, Lena Horn, and Jerome Smith. Smith had been beaten in the Freedom rides of 1961, and in Mississippi. He was in New York receiving medical attention for injuries sustained in Birmingham.
At that meeting Robert Kennedy spoke about how the administration’s efforts in support of civil rights were unprecedented.
Jerome Smith responded, "Unprecedented?" The mere thought of being in the room with the Attorney General made him “nauseous.”
Kennedy was insulted arguing that Smith was talking to the Attorney General of the United States.
Then Loraine Hansberry, the author of the play A Raisin in the Sun had this to say. “You’ve got a great many very accomplished people in this room, Mr. Attorney General. But the only man you should be listening to is that man over there.” She pointed to Jerome Smith.
Kennedy tried to ignore her remark and continued to talk about his civil rights bill.
Then James Baldwin asked Smith if he would ever consider enlisting in the army to serve his country.
Smith answered, “Never! Never! Never!"
Kennedy was enraged by those words and asked, “How can you say that?”
Smith answered the question. His answer would be echoed by Mohammed Ali in later years. “These poor people (Vietnamese) did nothing to us,” “They’re more my brothers than you are.”
Kix reported that Kennedy was “irate” at those words and accused Smith of treason.
Lorraine Hansberry continued, “Look,” “If you can’t understand what this young man is saying, then we are without hope at all. Because you and your brother are representatives of the best that a white America can offer; and if you are insensitive to this, then there’s no alternative except our going into the streets … and chaos.”
After hours of more conversation, Hansberry concluded that given how Kennedy had failed to act in Birmingham—after watching those news programs, reading those newspaper articles with Birmingham datelines—given all that, she had no choice but to ignore Kennedy now. Then Hansberry and the rest of the group got up and left.
Before he left, Harry Belafonte said this to the Attorney General. “You don’t visit our pain… Those children are our children and—”
“Enough” Kennedy hissed.
The news of that meeting leaked to the press and Martin Luther King read the article. He then phoned Harry Belafonte and asked what happened.
Belafonte felt the meeting was a disaster that distanced the Attorney General from the movement.
Martin Luther King disagreed and had this to say.
“Maybe it’s just what Bobby (Kennedy) needed to hear.” Apparently, there was wisdom in King’s words.
Robert Kennedy thought of his children and how he would feel if his children were treated as the children of Birmingham. So, he talked to his brother, the President, about the need to endorse comprehensive civil rights legislation. In order to drive through his point, Robert Kennedy argued that winning the next election wasn’t the most important thing. Making sure that Black people who lived here had basic civil rights was more important.
A problem few people recognized is that the comprehensive legislation had already been adopted in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution in the year 1868. This Amendment argued that every citizen of the United States is supposed to have “equal protection under the law.”
In his speech to the public supporting civil rights legislation, President John F. Kennedy used the ideas of Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail in the following passage.
“who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his (Black people’s) place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?”
So, here we see how there was a clear change in the attitude of the Kennedy brothers on the question of civil rights. The question remains, Was this a fundamental change in their attitude?
Cuba
Before the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the Cuban people experienced a similar kind of dictatorship that Black people felt in Birmingham, Alabama. The dictator’s name was Fulgencio Batista.
The estimates are that about 20,000 Cubans died in police custody when Batista ruled the island. About 500,000 sugar cane workers lived on the knife edge of survival working long hours under the sweltering sun. The rural guards were the law and had the power to steal, rape, brutalize, or even murder those who resisted. This while Havana became a virtual playground for the affluent.
Understanding these conditions, we might appreciate why most Cuban people were ecstatic when the revolutionary army rode into Havana.
The new revolutionary government made it clear that this would be a new day.
Farm workers were given titles to the land they toiled on. Others were trained for better paying jobs. At the same time as the Birmingham campaign was underway, there was a massive literacy drive in Cuba that succeeded in teaching the vast majority of the population how to read. This literacy drive was the beginning of making Cuba the nation in the world with the most doctors per capita.
The United States supported the apartheid regime in South Africa for decades. When South Africa invaded Angola to install a puppet regime, Cuba sent their armed forces to defeat the South African invasion. The culmination of that effort combined with a series of events created an atmosphere where Nelson Mandela became the President of South Africa.
So, understanding this history, we need to ask the question, why did the Kennedy Administration support the invasion of Cuba in what is known as the Bay of Pigs? Then, why did the Kennedy Administration threaten Cuba with atomic bombs in the Cuban Missile Crisis?
Clearly both Cuba and the United States are sovereign nations. The United States has thousands of atomic bombs. So, if the U.S. had the right to have those bombs, why was the Kennedy Administration opposed to Cuba having those same weapons?
The government’s response is that they were trying to defend the people of this country. Well, if that was the case, then why didn’t the government defend the children of Birmingham in 1963?
In my opinion, the only reason why the U.S. threatened Cuba with atomic bombs was to maintain their position as the world’s superpower.
Conclusion
In the international struggle to liberate humanity, I believe we need to understand the difference between the words tactics and strategy. Strategy is the overall perspective that a liberation struggle uses. Tactics are the methods used at a particular time in the struggle.
Clearly, the tactic of nonviolent civil disobedience was effective to a certain extent in the civil rights movement. However, the tactic of armed self-defense was also effective in Monroe, North Carolina in a movement led by Robert F. Williams.
Martin Luther King learned about nonviolent civil disobedience from Mahatma Gandhi’s largely nonviolent resistance struggle for independence in India. Gandhi learned about nonviolent struggle from the African National Congress when he lived in South Africa.
The ANC promoted nonviolent resistance until the South African armed forces massacred 69 people in Sharpeville.
Then the ANC transitioned to the armed struggle. At his trial, Nelson Mandela argued that there comes a time in the history of every nation when the people either use arms or there is no longer a nation.
Malcolm X, in my opinion, summarized the strategy for liberation in four words. “By any means necessary.”
Clearly the Cuban Revolution would not have happened were it not for the use of armed struggle. The point is that armed struggle is warranted only when the masses of people are willing to do what it takes to remove the old power. We see the goals of liberation in Thomas Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence “to provide new guards for their future security.” While Jefferson was a slave owner, his words remain relevant today.
Well, this review has been too long, but I will conclude by saying that Paul Kix book is well worth reading. However, when reading this important book, I would question the limitations of what was clearly achieved in Birmingham in 1963. I would also ask the question, what wasn’t achieved?
No comments:
Post a Comment