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| Author | Diane McWhorter |
|---|---|
| Subject | African-American civil rights movement |
| Publisher | Simon & Schuster |
Publication date | 2001 |
Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, is a nonfiction book about theAfrican-American civil rights movement written byDiane McWhorter and published bySimon & Schuster in 2001. The book, which is partinvestigative journalism and partmemoir, won theJ. Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the 2002Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.[1]
McWhorter grew up inBirmingham, Alabama, and recounts being about the same age as the girls killed in theSeptember 1963 bombing of the16th Street Baptist Church, though she "was growing up on the wrong side of the revolution". While four black girls were murdered in that day's bombing, McWhorter recalls that the only repercussion of the killings on her white high school was the cancellation of a play rehearsal.Carry Me Home describes how bigotry was prevalent among whites and her interviews and reviews of documents from the civil rights era showed "the long tradition of enmeshment between law enforcers andKlansmen", ranging from local and state police to agents of theFederal Bureau of Investigation.[2]
She describes how local political leaders, newspaper editors and Police, by supporting segregation exercised consistently poor judgment which rescued the cause of civil rights demonstrators during theBirmingham campaign; police chiefBull Connor responding to peaceful protests from local teenagers with high-pressure fire hose and police dogs and encouraged Ku Klux Klan attacks.Wyatt Tee Walker of theSouthern Christian Leadership Conference recounted how "Birmingham would have been lost if Bull had let us go down to the city hall and pray".'[2]
McWhorter notes the May 3, 1963, photo byAssociated Press photographerBill Hudson of Walter Gadsden, an African-American bystander who had been grabbed by a sunglasses-wearing police officer, while aGerman Shepherd lunged at his chest.[3] The photo appearedabove the fold, covering three columns in the next day's issue ofThe New York Times, as well as in other newspapers nationwide.[4] McWhorter wrote that Hudson's photo that day drove "international opinion to the side of the civil rights revolution".[5]
In his review of the book inThe New York Times,David K. Shipler credits McWhorter as being "impressive at gathering facts and sourcing them precisely"; though he notes that "[a]t times, the themes are lost in dizzying detail, the trees overwhelm the forest", he nonetheless concludes that it is "very much worth the effort."[2]
The book won the 2002Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.[6]
