Carry Me Home

Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution

Diane McWhorter

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2001
• eBook ISBN: 9780743226486
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Now with a new afterword, the Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatic account of the civil rights era’s climactic battle in Birmingham as the movement, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., brought down the institutions of segregation.


"The Year of Birmingham," 1963, was a cataclysmic turning point in America’s long civil rights struggle. Child demonstrators faced down police dogs and fire hoses in huge nonviolent marches against segregation. Ku Klux Klansmen retaliated by bombing the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four young black girls. Diane McWhorter, daughter of a prominent Birmingham family, weaves together police and FBI records, archival documents, interviews with black activists and Klansmen, and personal memories into an extraordinary narrative of the personalities and events that brought about America’s second emancipation.

In a new afterword—reporting last encounters with hero Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and describing the current drastic anti-immigration laws in Alabama—the author demonstrates that Alabama remains a civil rights crucible.

PART I

Precedents

1938–1959

1.

THE CITY OF PERPETUAL PROMISE

1938

A Local God

VULCAN WAS THE LARGEST cast-iron man in the universe. From his pedestal on the mountaintop, the fifty-six-foot-tall god of fire extended his nine-ton right arm in a salute to the valley of blast furnaces that made Birmingham, Alabama, what it was. Here was reputedly the only place on earth where the essential ingredients of iron-making existed in one spot—coal, iron ore, and lime. These mineral gifts had always been Birmingham’s salvation and its damnation, and few natives could distinguish the two conditions. Harper’s captured the local state of purgatory in a 1937 article about “this town, without parallel anywhere,” called “The City of Perpetual Promise.”

According to legend, the inspiration for Birmingham came to a Georgia-bred engineer named John Milner in 1858 as he stood near Vulcan’s future site on the crest of Red Mountain, the Appalachian foothill named for the color of its iron-ore deposits. The valley below was dotted with the farms of the original squatters, Andrew Jackson’s rowdy disciples from Tennessee. But Milner was struck by what it might one day become: a “great workshop town.” He built a railroad to the mineral region, double-crossed some carpetbaggers who tried to horn in with their own railroad, and began selling the first plots of his city on December 19, 1871. Milner and his partners had thought they were naming Birmingham after “the best workshop town in all England,” but at the time their urban model was world-famous as the manufacturing center of tawdry merchandise.

Birmingham remained a city of dubious superlatives, like its immortal but lame icon. Vulcan was the special patron of cuckolds as well as the god of the forge, unhappily married to the promiscuous Venus. His city, too, seemed to make the worst of enviable circumstances. The iron man had been Birmingham’s grand prize–winning exhibit at the 1904 St. Louis world’s fair, with an inscription at his base predicting that his city would “exceed all others in ‘Time’s March.’ ” Only three years later, the South’s great industrial hope had become a backwater colony of Pittsburgh, the property of the United States Steel Corporation. Vulcan was staked at the state fairgrounds, a soot-blackened shill holding a sign honoring another great Pittsburgh industry, Heinz pickles, and later an outsize bottle of Coca-Cola, the business that made arch-rival Atlanta the fastest-growing city in the South.

There had been an earlier prophecy, dating back to the depression of 1894, that more accurately foretold the future: “Hard times come to Birmingham first and stay longest.” Forty years later, the Great Depression of the 1930s had impoverished the one-industry town, darkening the steel mills clustered like a colony of dragons on the western periphery. Unemployed workers slept in the cold beehive coke ovens. The “pellagra ring” around the city had expanded into rickets, causing calcium-deprived children to go spastic. Adults coped with a V.D. epidemic. The writer James Agee had marveled at “the hard flat incurable sore of Birmingham” when he and the photographer Walker Evans passed through town on their way to find the Alabama sharecroppers who would be the subject of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

They were among the many journalists who made pilgrimages to Birmingham to gawk at the mess, generating more dubious superlatives. The homicide rate had earned the city the title of Murder Capital of the World. The illiteracy rate (also number one) had conspired with the poverty to produce a haven for loan sharks. Their profit margin humbled the industrialists quartered in the city’s smattering of “tall buildings,” the only skyscrapers in the state of Alabama, even if their architecture was perfunctory at best. Historically, the Big Mules had little patience for civic flourishes, including schools, so single-minded were they at converting minerals into cash. “Before God, I will be damned before I will put my hand in my pocket for anything,” an early capitalist had pledged.

That was not quite true. For behind Vulcan, south of the bare buttocks that would be a perennial scandal to local Baptists, the coal and iron aristocracy had anted up for some of the most expensive houses in the South, including a replica of Mount Vernon. Pursuing a gracious life in the “improved estate section” of Mountain Brook, upwind from their mills and “over the mountain,” the first families of Birmingham seemed immune from the Depression. They were far less upset about the plight of their workers, or even of the iron pipe they made, than about the “socialistic” remedies President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had proposed to mend the economy. The New Deal did more than threaten their businesses. It shook their sense of their identities, their caste. At the country club, the latest FDR joke—or a Poe-inspired poem about “the boresome Eleanor”—was a declaration of “I belong!”

Roosevelt had pronounced Birmingham the hardest-hit city in America, the superlative that most offended civic egos. Among the hundreds of millions of federal relief dollars the New Deal mobilized to the paralyzed district were $44,000, courtesy of the Works Progress Administration, to liberate Vulcan from his thirty-year confinement at the fairgrounds and move our symbol of perpetual promise, glittering with a new coat of aluminum paint, to a floodlit pedestal atop Red Mountain.

As it happened, Giuseppe Moretti, the Italian sculptor commissioned by the city fathers to make Vulcan for the St. Louis world’s fair, had designed a companion deity to the god of industry—a soulful-looking marble head of Christ exhibited alongside him at the expo. Moretti’s apocryphal wish had been that the two never be separated, as a reminder that a god dedicated to making money was the pagan—whose own creation, Pandora, had unleashed evil on earth. When Vulcan was rescued by Roosevelt, the city officials, unable to find a safe perch, provided no room on the hilltop for Jesus.

Sometimes it seemed that all the profanity of industrial enterprise had collected in Birmingham. The worst fear of the heavy manufacturers was that their labor force might organize into a union and exercise self-determination in the workplace. In their exertions to prevent that from happening—forbidding the workers to grow corn in their gardens, lest the tall stalks serve as cover for union-organizing meetings—they had built a stunning example of what FDR had called “the dictatorship of a small minority of individuals and corporations.” But by the very fact of its being capitalism’s city in a valley, Birmingham had also produced the bravest, most electric practitioners of democracy. The profit motive had inspired, in the have-nots as well as the haves, a complex mesh of deformed ideals, and the struggle between those who owned the smokestacks and those who paid the human toll of industrialization had been by turns bloody and farcical.

Birmingham had carried into the modern industrial era the central dilemma of the South’s agrarian past: the systematic subjugation of its black inhabitants. Founded during Reconstruction, the city seemed destined to become the post-bellum host of the country’s classic confrontations between Left and Right, between black and white, and ultimately between justice and power.

The first of these turning points took place in 1938. In late November, the New Deal arrived in Birmingham like some phantom made flesh—demon or angel, depending on which side you were on. At the Municipal Auditorium gathered the most remarkable group of world savers ever under one roof: academics and ironworkers, social scientists and poets, Communists and Klansmen, and a pageant of New Deal grandees led by Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. This was the inauguration of the concerted struggle for freedom that would culminate in Birmingham a quarter century later. It was also Bull Connor’s first challenge.

Great Men

JAMES ALEXANDER SIMPSON was within sight of the mountaintop. Perhaps the most powerful politician in Alabama at age forty-eight, he had styled himself the savior of free enterprise from the “socialism” of the New Deal. In Birmingham as around the country, Big Business’s crusade against Roosevelt had come to transcend politics and even economics, taking on the intensity of a holy war against infidels. It was not enough for Simpson and the elite interests he spoke for to complain that the federal government was telling its corporate betters how much money to charge for their goods and how much to pay their employees. They also made fun of the President’s polio-crippled legs—the result, they contended, of syphilis contracted from his wife’s black lovers.

Fellow lawyers were sometimes startled at how emotional Simpson became defending his corporate clients, and there did seem to be something Oedipal about his pro-business passion. In 1899, nine-year-old Jim’s father, a suffering farmer, had given up all the family assets for them to join a utopian community in Middle Tennessee run according to the principles of Karl Marx. The Simpsons had been among the diehard crackpots who followed the dwindling Ruskin Commonwealth to the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp in South Georgia, settling in an abandoned sawmill camp so squalid that Jim later said Roosevelt would have targeted it for slum clearance. The boy absorbed the social shame of his mother, a country doctor’s proud daughter, who cringed at the “comrades’ ” table manners, and he later mocked the collective’s notion of industry, such as “the roasting of corn as a substitute for coffee.” Though his Ruskin experience lasted only a year, it left Simpson with a hatred of any government interference in the accumulation of private wealth. The childhood taste of dysfunctional communism had marked him as Alabama’s patron saint of organized money.

“Organized money” was the epithet that the President and his lieutenant Hugo Black employed to tweak the forces of reaction that men like Simpson had mobilized against the New Deal. When he was Alabama’s senior senator, Black had been the congressional brains and brawn behind Roosevelt’s programs, denouncing the “capitalist system,” which favored the few “while others, equally able and gifted, but less fortunately placed, are starved not only physically but mentally.” Black’s legislative aggression against Big Business had bestowed national purpose on the equally ambitious Simpson. Inverted images of each other, Simpson and Black, Alabama’s Great Men, presided over the two dominant poles in the state identity that also now defined American politics.

Back in the 1910s and 1920s, when they worked opposite sides of the Birmingham courts as “damage suit” lawyers, Simpson had always sucked hind teat to “Old Ego,” whose confidence drove adversaries to whine, “Look at that son of a bitch, he thinks he’s going to become President of the United States.” Those cases had been their first ideological standoff. Arguing for the voiceless drudges (including convicts leased to the mines), Black became the workshop town’s Robin Hood, wheedling outrageous jury awards for injured laborers. As the industrialists’ shield against such “bolsheviks,” Simpson refused to settle cases worth far less than his legal fees, in order to deter dangerous precedents of “redistributing the wealth.” The two country boys on the make were respectful adversaries, performing essential functions of industrial hygiene, until the rise of the Ku Klux Klan set them on their collision course in politics.

The Klan

OF THE MANY EXCUSES Hugo Black later gave for joining the Klan, the one that seemed most outlandish was probably the most accurate: The hooded brotherhood of white supremacists was also the liberal insurgent wing of the Democratic Party. The Klan was the flawed consummation of the have-nots’ long flirtation with power, which had begun with the signal political phenomenon of the post-bellum South: Populism. In a brief revolution during the early 1890s, oppressed farmers had seceded from the “Solid South’s” Democratic monolith to form the People’s Party and, most shockingly of all, entered into a coalition with former slaves.¹ The rebellion terrified the state’s reigning “colonel and carpetbagger” oligarchy of big planters and Birmingham’s fledgling but fierce industrialists. And so they quashed it, disfranchising the poor-white revolutionaries along with their Negro confederates with a stroke of the pen so indelibly clever that it passed into the language as shorthand for the South’s peculiar brand of democracy, surviving segregation itself: the poll tax.² Populism’s other legacy was the demagoguery of power against insurrection: The Pops were smeared as “nigger lovers and nigger huggers,” a “communistic ring,” and “simple-minded dupes to outside agitators.”

The people’s democratic impulse had not been squelched, however. They continued to rise up, next as Prohibitionists and then, after World War I, as Klansmen, seizing the racist propaganda for the common folks. In 1915, the Klan, fallow since Reconstruction, had been revived in Atlanta by an ex–Methodist preacher who had been inspired by a drunken hallucination of celestial night riders while staying with relatives in Birmingham. Initially just one of the many fraternal lodges of the day helping urban newcomers make the transition from country to city, the Klan was vaulted beyond its parochial horizon by a popular movie romanticizing the “true story” of the Reconstruction Klan, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Taking out after upwardly mobile ethnic Catholics more than the socially immobile Negro population, the Klan became the driving agent of postwar nativism, sweeping from Main Street to Zenith, through the Deep South to Middle America, claiming four million members at its height in the 1920s.

In 1921, The Nation declared Birmingham the “American hotbed of anti-Catholic fanaticism.” That year, Hugo Black won an easy acquittal for a Klansman—a gum-chewing Methodist parson—who had walked onto the rectory porch of the largest Catholic church in Alabama and fatally shot a priest who that day had married his daughter to a Puerto Rican. For once, Black and the industrialists seemed to be on the same side. The coal and iron men were humoring the Klan. As long as their “native-born” laborers were fighting the large Catholic-immigrant portion of the work force, there was no danger of union solidarity even among whites, let alone across color lines.³

On election day 1926, however, the bosses realized that the Kluxers they had thought they owned were nothing but damned populists. The surprise winner in the U.S. Senate race, Hugo Black, took the stage at a Klan Klorero held at the city auditorium to celebrate “Alabama’s Super Government.” The equally unanticipated governor-elect was the leader of the Montgomery klavern, Bibb Graves, a mix of Yale-educated intelligence, tobacco-chewing folk appeal, dictatorial temperament, and a history of Populist activism. As the Klaliff handed them gold plaques, Graves clasped Black’s hand and asked, smiling, “We don’t have to kiss, do we?” But the two friends embraced in an alliance that yoked the state’s customary rulers, whom Graves had christened “Big Mules” because they munched hay from the heavy wagons drawn by little mules.

This was the pair that galvanized the right-wing political c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction: September 15, 1963
• Part I: Precedents, 1938–1959
• Part II: Movement, 1960–1962
• Part III: The Year of Birmingham, 1963
• Epilogue
• Justice: 2001
• Déjà Vu: 2012
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About Diane McWhorter
• Abbreviations Used in Source Notes
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Photo Credits
• Copyright