A lesson learned from YOU HAVE TO BE PREPARED TO DIE BEFORE YOU CAN BEGIN TO LIVE: TEN WEEKS IN BIRINGHAM THAT CHANGED AMERICA, by Paul Kix

There's never an "ideal" time to confront injustice--you just need to do it.

    Lately I've been on a roll reading great books, but Paul Kix's new book recounting Martin Luther King's most famous protest campaign is a real page-turner, and one that feels deeply relevant in an era where people feel injustice happening on a global scale. As a man who has an interracial family, Kix tells a deeply personal story of how MLK, whose Civil Rights Movement had faltered and struggled for years to make major progress, finally awoke the conscious of America (and its ruling brothers JFK and RFK) with his Birmingham Campaign of 1963. Many of the Civil Rights Movement's most iconic moments came in the wake of Birmingham, and what was ironic about its success was that everyone told MLK it was an "ill-timed" protest--that he was better off waiting and hoping for more gradual progress.

    MLK took on great personal risk when he and his fellow civil rights leaders decided to challenge the segregation of Birmingham "Bombingham" Alabama, a deeply oppressive and violent city even by the standards of the mid-20th century South. At the time the city was under an iron grip of rule by Sheriff Eugene "Bull" Connor, a raging white supremacist who had been in power for decades (having once clashed back in the 1930's with the progressive First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt). His police force was deeply intertwined with the KKK, to the extent where most of the city's black residents were terrified to even report crimes to the police, much less to demand prosecution and justice. After years of struggle to get the national government to intervene more on behalf of civil rights, King decided that if segregation could be broken in Birmingham, the rest of the country could no longer sustain it, and he organized a massive protest campaign in the city in the summer of 1963.

    To many more cautious civil rights leaders, King's protest was brazen and unwise. The country had elected the northern liberal JFK as its president back in 1960, and he had named his brother Bobby as his attorney general; the two had promised sympathy and gradual progress in the field of civil rights, and had made a few token gestures on the movement's behalf. Birmingham itself had shown signs of moderation, as the city's white residents had finally voted Connor out of office weeks beforehand (Connor refused to accept the election results and was fighting to stay in office). Nonetheless, MLK and his organization insisted that they could not wait additional years and decades hoping for gradual progress that might never really arrive; the daily injustice of life for African-Americans had to be challenged and exposed for the entire country to see.

    Kix's book tells a series of gripping tales: MLK's frustration in the protest's early days as the city's adults were too terrified to join in for fear of retaliation; his agonizing decision to allow black children to join in the protests, knowing that the televised atrocities that police committed against them would enflame America's conscience; how RFK, rattled by what he saw African-Americans going through throughout the campaign, gradually converted from his brother's amoral protector into a passionate civil rights advocate in his own right; how MLK had to negotiate with the city's white leaders for draining days while they debated the timeline of integration and how to get the white public to accept it.

    In the end, the events of Birmingham convinced the Kennedys that only the national government could force people to do the right thing and acknowledge the justice of civil rights, and its success directly led to MLK's greatest speech that summer under the Lincoln Memorial, as he became modern America's Founding Father. Some injustices can only be corrected through gradual and hard work as hearts and minds are changed and convinced to evolve, but others are simply not worth waiting on. They must be directly confronted and challenged, and will not be alleviated by people agreeing to "be patient and wait."

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