At the Faculty Black History Month quiz, our colleagues correctly answered Black History questions to receive the following books:
The Birmingham Project Revisited, by Dawoud Bey, 2023. (Jeffrey Lebensburger)
The Good Lord Bird, by James McBride 2013 (Marjorie Lee White)
A Time to Speak, by Charles Morgan, Jr. 1964 (Lauren Nassetta)
The Most Segregated City in America, by Charles Connerly, 2005 (Cary Cavender)
Alabama v. King: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Criminal Trial That Launched the Civil Rights Movement, by Dan Abrams and Fred D. Gray, 2022 (Santiago Borasino and Nancy Tofil)
You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America, by Paul Kix, 2023 (Amanda Soong)
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride, 2023 (Maria Rueda-Altez)
You can learn more about the books below. We will publish the questions after the Staff Meeting and Black History Book Giveaway in early March.
The Birmingham Project Revisited by Dawoud Bey, 2023.
This was an exhibit at the BMA on the 60th anniversary of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. There are photographs of current 11-16 year olds (the ages of the 6 children who were killed on Sept 15, 1963, that are side by side with people who are now 71-76 and were 11-16 years old on Sept 15, 1963.
The Good Lord Bird, by James McBride 2013
Henry Shackleford is a young slave living in the Kansas Territory in 1857, when the region is a battleground between anti- and pro-slavery forces. When John Brown, the legendary abolitionist, arrives in the area, an argument between Brown and Henry’s master quickly turns violent. Henry is forced to leave town—with Brown, who believes he’s a girl. Over the ensuing months, Henry—whom Brown nicknames Little Onion—conceals his true identity as he struggles to stay alive. Eventually Little Onion finds himself with Brown at the historic raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859—one of the great catalysts for the Civil War. James McBride is a terrific modern black writer.
A Time to Speak, Charles Morgan, Jr. 1964
Charles Morgan, Jr., was a young white lawyer with a practice in Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1950s and 60s. The Monday after the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing, standing before his “young businessman” peers, Morgan rejected the usual platitudes and excuses: that extremists, Klansmen, rednecks, were responsible for the violence in Birmingham, and in a short and eloquent speech he answered the rhetorical question: “who IS guilty?” Each of us, he said. “Each citizen who has not consciously attempted to bring about peaceful compliance with the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States…. every person in this community who has in any way contributed to the popularity of hatred is at least as guilty, or more so, than the demented fool who threw that bomb.” The Morgan Project founded on June 1, 2020, provides active and meaningful programs that work to teach and celebrate Black history.
The Most Segregated City in America, Charles Connerly, 2005
Spanning over sixty years, Charles E. Connerly's study begins in the 1920s, when Birmingham used urban planning as an excuse to implement racial zoning laws, pointedly sidestepping the 1917 U.S. Supreme Court Buchanan v. Warley decision that had struck down racial zoning.
Alabama v. King: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Criminal Trial That Launched the Civil Rights Movement, Dan Abrams and Fred D. Gray, 2022
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery, Alabama bus. After she was arrested and fined for her refusal, the African American community organized a bus boycott. Ninety-three people were jailed for breaking the city’s anti-boycott statute, but rather than trying all of them, the prosecutors chose to make an example of just one, a 27-year-old minister named Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Fred Gray, 24 years old and one of only two black lawyers in Montgomery, had represented Parks and now agreed to defend King in court. The stakes were huge: This was not just a trial about a city statute, this was an attempt to launch a movement in the face of an often-violent effort by a segregated Southern city to prevent them from succeeding. And it would set Gray on a path that would lead him to making an impassioned argument in front of the Supreme Court against segregation in Montgomery’s public transit.
You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America, Paul Kix, 2023
In May of 2020, as reporter Paul Kix stared at a different photo–that of a Minneapolis police officer suffocating George Floyd–he kept returning to the other photo taken half a century earlier of a German Shephard police dog lunging at a civil rights teenager in Birmingham. It was in the inspiration for his historical study.
In You Have To Be Prepared To Die Before You Can Begin To Live, Paul Kix takes the reader behind the scenes as he tells the story of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s pivotal 10 week campaign in 1963 to end segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. At the same time, he also provides a window into the minds of the four extraordinary men who led the campaign—Martin Luther King, Jr., Wyatt Walker, Fred Shuttlesworth, and James Bevel. I also learned about the role of Harry Belafonte in the civil rights movement anad in Project C, as the Birmingham protests were known.
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, James McBride, 2023
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, they found a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.
As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.