Reading Diane McWhorter's Carry Me Home: Part I

This Pulitzer Prize winning account of Birmingham's history and its role in the Civil Rights movement is a dense, but truly eye-opening read. At over 700 pages of relatively small font, it's one of those books that, for me at least, requires a fairly long period of time and a lot of patience to finish. The last time I tackled such a task was the summer during college that I dedicated to reading the immense Russian classics Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov (well worth it). As I muddle through the final month of my current job, I find myself in another relatively stress-free time to finally tackle Carry Me Home, which I had shelved for some years since I purchased it. In addition to the blessing of time, a recent PBS series on the Civil Rights movement, as well as reverberations from the Obama campaign, have peaked my interest in these seminal events in American history. Given that I grew up in American during the immediate aftermath of the Civil Rights movement, it is strange (but not by accident, as I've come to realize) that I knew so little about the events surrounding the movement. Now, I'm learning a great deal about the place that produced me, and it has been an enlightening experience. I plan to blog some thoughts on the book, and, given that it will take me some time, and the book spans so many themes, I'll break it up into parts.

The first section of the book has been primarily devoted to uncovering the roots of legal segregation in Birmingham, which, for primarily economic reasons, were stronger than those in other Southern cities. The all-powerful corporation U.S. Steel had a strong financial stake in Birmingham, where, it turns out, the mineral deposits were perfect for producing the steel that earned the company its profits. The corporation saw as the primary threat to its massive profits the organization of the Birmingham-area labor force. The Populist and Progressive movements, which were rooted in leftist ideas about the redistribution of wealth and the organization of the working class, had found conditions in Birmingham ripe for the organization of a strong labor movement. Indeed, the deplorable working conditions of many steel workers, combined with the lavish, leisurely lives of the very few who controlled the industry, had created a tinderbox of discontent from which a powerful leftist movement could emerge.

The corporation brought in experts in union-busting, who saw the demographics of Birmingham as providing the perfect opportunity to launch one of the most effective anti-labor strategies: "Divide 'em" ("Depress 'em," and "Drug 'em" being the other two primary tools). The steel-controlled (and steel-controlling) white lawmakers, kept in power by racist and anti-poor tools like the poll tax and voter intimidation, instituted strict segregation policies to keep whites and blacks from meeting together at left-sponsored rallies. The infamous Eugene "Bull" Connor famously arrived at conferences sponsored by national labor organizations to erect physical barriers between the white and black participants and to stake an army of watchful police officers around the meetings. In addition, the corporation paid a handful of charismatic working class men to organize Klan rallies and lead masses of poor whites in anti-black bombing campaigns and other intimidation tactics. The result of these efforts was highly effective: those who might otherwise spend their energies organizing against the corporation that enslaved them instead spent their energies fighting each other. The powers-that-be took advantage of their workers' lack of education and residual feelings of post-reconstruction racism in order to suppress any rebellion. It was a brilliant strategy that worked.

Amidst the red scare of the 50's and 60's, Progressive and labor-centric advocacy became politically unviable as a rallying point. With the leftist political organizations largely hiding out, and its adherents working hard to disassociate themselves, the struggle for black rights in the South had to take a new form unsponsored by Communist sympathizers. Out of this emerged the Civil Rights movement, and leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose struggle was rooted in a church-centric, equal rights and human dignity approach, rather than the leftist, organization-of-labor and equal-economics-for-all approach that was so sorely defeated by segregation.

This narrative has been enlightening for me, as one can easy draw strong parallels between the union-busting strategies of the Alabama fascists and the hate-bating of the modern political Right. Barack Obama was onto something in his (much maligned) statement that working class whites had become embittered at their government's inability to respond to their needs, and thus had "clung" to issues like religion and guns. The 2004 Bush victory against John Kerry was almost certainly aided by Bush's pushing of issues like gay marriage, which served to draw a wedge between traditional Democratic constituents and the masses of uneducated whites who, in reality, had been made poorer by Bush's economic policies, and whose families had suffered disproportionately from war deaths in Iraq. By exploiting the relative ignorance of those who were harmed by Bush's policies, the Bush team effectively drove those voters away from the Democratic party, whose candidate would have almost certainly supported policies that were better for those voters than those of Bush.

I look forward to continuing with Carry Me Home, and I hope that I will continue to learn both about the history of the region that bred me, as well as about the political strategies that continue to shape America. Until next time!