Carry Me Home: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution
Diane McWhorter
In Carry Me Home, investigative journalist and Alabama native Diane McWhorter examines Birmingham’s racial history, the activists who pushed for desegregation and the events leading up to the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that killed four young Black girls. But McWhorter also gives readers an inside look the role the city’s privileged class played during the civil rights era. Specifically, she paints for readers a picture of her life growing up in Mountain Brook, a wealthy Birmingham suburb on what she calls “the wrong side of the revolution.” Her father came from a well-to-do family and joined forces with those opposed to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and his nonviolent demonstrations to end racial segregation. In telling her father’s story, McWhorter gives readers insight into the alliances between the city’s Big Mule elites and the lower-class Klansmen who carried out their wishes, with violent and sometimes deadly results. Carry Me Home won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. (Simon & Schuster)