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

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Paul Kix Jamie Raab

You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live

Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America

Paul Kix, Jamie Raab

$59.95

Hardback

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English

Celadon Books
02 May 2023

History; History of the Americas; 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000; Social & cultural history

From journalist 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., 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.

By: Paul Kix
Edited by: Jamie Raab
Imprint: Celadon Books
Dimensions: Height: 236mm, Width: 165mm, Spine: 36mm
Weight: 567g
ISBN: 9781250807694
ISBN 10: 1250807697
Pages: 400
Publication Date: 02 May 2023
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Paul Kix is an author and writer whose last book was The Saboteur, a bestselling and critically acclaimed true story of the most daring man in World War II. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, GQ, and ESPN The Magazine, among other publications. He lives in Connecticut with his family.

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

This is the story of the ten weeks that gave America the Letter from the Birmingham Jail, a tight, powerful, emotional history that seemed to alter our nation forever; and at the same time, this narrative is its own letter from a jail, the existential one of a man raising Black children in modern America. This is a letter, and a poem, and a prayer, and in the end, a map: a document that takes us into a dark past to show us all the way back into the light. -Wright Thompson, New York Times bestselling author of The Cost of These Dreams and Pappyland