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

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Paul Kix is a senior editor at ESPN Magazine, and has written for numerous publications from the Boston Globe to the Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker.

From journalist Paul Kix, the riveting story of the 1963 Birmingham Campaign-the ten weeks that shaped not only the course of the Civil Rights Movement but the future of America. In May of 2020, as writer Paul Kix and his wife Sonya stared at the footage of George Floyd dying, they asked themselves a terrifying question. Could the same fate await their Black children? Their kids, who later saw the Floyd video, became fearful, and that fear, over the next few days, hardened into a cynicism about America. To try to allay it, Kix showed his children another notorious image from half a century earlier: A photograph taken in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. These two images nearly 60 years apart echoed each other. In what ways could the one from Birmingham-of a Black teenager, a policeman, and his lunging German Shepherd-instruct us in how to live today, when faced with footage from our own lasting violence? Attempting to answerthat question for his childrenonly raised larger ones for Kix. What was the full legacy of the Birmingham photo? And of the campaign from which it stemmed? In You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live, Paul Kix brings to life the past and tells the story of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's 10-week struggle in 1963 to do the impossible: to end segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, which was less a city than a site of domestic terror. Kix's vivid account captures the horror as well as the hope of that campaign and provides a window into the minds of the four extraordinary men who led it: Martin Luther King, Jr, Wyatt Walker, Fred Shuttlesworth, and James Bevel. The bookis the firstto zero in on the ten weeks of Project C, as it was known, and in doing so, brings home what it felt like to live through that spring and how its echoes resound through our culture now. You Have to be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live is crucial to our understanding of our own time and the line that has inspired activists worldwide: Be the change you want to see in the world.

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