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On Writing
Artful John Gardner vs. the King of Horror

Stories of the struggle for integration

by Donna Raskin

Although the story of integration has been told before—Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters and Pillar of Fire are two of the best books on the subject—Diane McWhorter and A. Jonathan Bass have both found something new and different to discuss about civil rights in Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (Simon & Schuster, $35.00) and Blessed Are The Peacemakers: Martin Luther King Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (LSU Press, $39.95).

Both authors describe specific civil rights struggles in "Bombingham," a city also once called "the Johannesburg of the United States." Just as interesting as their subject matter, however, is their writing and reporting styles, which are so different that they ended up with complementary, not redundant, books. Nevertheless, only one of them is ultimately a good read.

McWhorter, who grew up in a politically-connected, well-to-do white Birmingham family, documents how vast the segregationist forces were in the city. From the richest men in town to the police to the Klansmen to her very own family, it seems as if almost every white person in Birmingham was a racist to his or her bones.

The story she tells begins decades before the civil rights struggle, when Birmingham was first being formed, and not peaceably, by industrialists and workers. In fact, the city seems to have been created with an "us against them" mentality burned deep within it. On top of that, Ms. McWhorter also wants to narrate the history of her family within the town. "What were 'civil rights?' I knew that they were bad and that my father was fighting against them, and this was why he rarely came home evenings...Soon those sensations of anxiety and shame would crystallize into a concrete fear: that my father was a member of the Ku Klux Klan."

The history of a city, racism, violence, a family's involvement...unfortunately, it's just all too confusing and full of details. McWhorter's book is almost 600 pages and ends with almost 80 pages of reference material. It's filled with horrifying anecdotes and stories of just how awful and ugly hatred is, but I wouldn't say I felt enlightened after reading all of those pages.

In contrast, Bass modestly illuminates the story of the eight Birmingham clergymen (Catholic, Jewish, Methodist, Episcopal, and Baptist) who published a letter in early 1963 asking "our own Negro community to withdraw support from these demonstrations." They made their request in the hopes of maintaining peace, while still calling for integration. Their mistake, however, was made at the beginning of their letter when they referred to "cherished patterns of life in our beloved Southland." Clearly, not every Southern person, particularly the darker-skinned ones, felt this way of life was something to be cherished.

Dr. King, Birmingham's Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, and the young teenagers they had marching in the streets understood that black people had to make noise in order to let everyone know that "there was no more convenient season" for equality. Dr. King was arrested after a Good Friday march in Birmingham, put into solitary confinement and, once there, he began to write his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." While the letter was addressed to the clergymen, it was never mailed. Instead it was published by newspapers and magazines.

Despite their hesitant language, the clergymen were pro-integration (although in varying degrees and time frames). In fact, they were each truly between a rock and a hard place: They were considered "nigger lovers" and "Commies" by white supremacists and yet held responsible for holding integration back by black society.

To tell the story, Bass narrates the biographies of each of the clergymen, explaining how they came to this moment in history. Then he explains how King and his troops wrote the letter and had it published. Finally, we learn the reaction of each of the clergymen and what happened to them afterward. Some were run out of town, and some went on to become radicals in their religious organizations.

It's a great story, and Mr. Bass' organization of it is a great literary tactic. While his writing is a bit pedestrian—there's no poetry in his words and Birmingham itself, as a place, isn't evoked as it is in McWhorter's book—Bass' book as a whole is much more effective and successful than McWhorter's. It's less ambitious, yet people come alive in all their complexities.

After all of the struggle, both violent and civil, in the end, there are few Americans who live even a moderately integrated life. A report released in April 2001 by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University found that we are less likely than ever to live in diverse areas.