Powerfully written, vividly recounted, McWhorter's intimate yet magisterial narrative adds important insights to our understanding of the Ku Klux Klan and its connections with official power in the South. In my quest to understand how a family of Ivy League-educated country clubbers could have produced a vigilante spirit like my father, I ended up discovering that the elite establishment of the city itself had nurtured the Ku Klux Klan and created the brutal conditions that incited a magnificent nonviolent revolution. McWhorter also reminds us how important industrial labor was in parts of the New South. By examining Birmingham's past as the Pittsburgh of the South, McWhorter offers a persuasive interpretation of the connections between class and race relations in this city. The conflict that made Birmingham America's racial Armageddon in 1963 was the 'class warfare' that had always threatened the confidence of a young nation founded on the preposterous principle of equality.
Every war produces different stories.
Taken together, these extraordinary books offer compelling and complementary reflections and insights. We need to know these stories. We need to hear these voices. Two generations after the civil rights movement began, we have just begun to uncover the truth about the people and events that challenged the legacy of slavery and transformed mid-20th century America. It is wise to remember that the power of that legacy lives on, without legal segregation, permeating our culture and society in every imaginable way.