Mar. 11: Men’s Book Group Discussion of “You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live”

Wednesday, Mar. 11  |  7:30 pm  |  Parish Hall, Zoom  - 

OPEN TO ALL!

1963 was a defining year for Martin Luther King, Jr. and his campaign to bring civil rights to Blacks through non-violence. He had just tried for weeks to integrate Albany, Georgia, and had failed utterly. Indeed, he had few real successes since the Montgomery Bus Boycott, seven years earlier. His response to this crises was audacious. He chose to strike at bigotry in the most segregated city in America, Birmingham Ala, where Bull Conner and the Klu Klux Klan kept an iron, violent grip on the lives of the Black people of that city.

Paul Kix covers the momentous and perilous fight by King and his brilliant and head-strong lieutenants to bring justice to the beleaguered Black citizens of Birmingham in his book, You Have to be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham that Changed America. Kix covers it all. The resistance of virtually all the Black clergy and Black adults to join King’s protest. Decades of violence and oppression were too much to allow them to dare to hope. But how could the campaign succeed without the support of the people who had been oppressed? Hundreds of police and firefighters were mobilized to stop them by any means available, augmented by 250 state troopers called in by George Wallace and even tanks. This is the story of the Letter from the Birmingham Jail written by King on toilet paper and on the margins of newspapers that were smuggled into this cell. It’s the story of a few, then hundreds, then thousands of youngsters, some as young as eight, who demonstrated and then willingly went to jail to achieve a future that their parents had never known. This is a gripping story that proved to be so powerful that John Kennedy after meeting with King and other Civil Rights leaders to build support for his seminal Civil Rights Act, said “[B]ut for Birmingham we wouldn’t be here.”

I hope you will join us to discuss this riveting book and the story it tells about faith, courage and determination in the face of relentless evil. Even if you can’t join us, I encourage you to read Kix’s book.

- Earle O’Donnell