You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live Quotes

“Everything—Fred’s faith, his love, his courage—stemmed from a hope that he could be the change he wanted to see in the world. It was a preposterous idea in Birmingham, Alabama, but Fred Shuttlesworth was a preposterous man. He believed in his hope so much, he would ultimately be arrested more than thirty times for his activism and be named in more cases that reached the Supreme Court than any other person in American history. The perseverance it took to continue to hope was girded by a belief, something that ran through Fred’s head so often after that Christmas Day bombing it became a refrain for his life, and something he shared with the New Yorkers now. “You have to be prepared to die before you can begin to live.”
― Paul Kix, You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America

“We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.”
― Paul Kix, You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America

“Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals. We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”
― Paul Kix, You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America

“when collective power, whether in the form of imperialism or class domination, exploits weakness, it can never be dislodged unless power is raised against it.”
― Paul Kix, You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America

“in this case, the Alabama clergymen represented a flaw in thinking common to Christian theology, to liberalism, to the Deep South, and to any nation that considered itself free and democratic. It assumed that power yielded to superior ideas.”
― Paul Kix, You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America

“the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin but the one who causes the darkness.” Martin refused to cause the darkness.”
― Paul Kix, You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America

“What was the alternative? To go along with the accommodationists, who would integrate at the pace white Birmingham set? To believe that the eloquent Albert Boutwell would be a good mayor and not just a dignified racist? Fred “made Black people uncomfortable,” Walker said, and discomfort was the point of this campaign. Walker had grown up in Merchantville, New Jersey, with a portrait of Frederick Douglass on the wall. What Douglass wrote still resonated with him: “It is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.” Damn right. Fred was not the problem. Black Birmingham was the problem. Segregation was the problem. As Walker put it: “See, it was the uncomfortableness that the presence of a Fred Shuttlesworth created. You have to understand how segregation is like a stain and it’s on everybody, and Fred represented the person who had the task of going around trying to wash the stain off.” They would succeed, Walker argued, when Black Birmingham started scrubbing, too.”
― Paul Kix, You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America

“The white people of Birmingham came to love Bull. That’s why they kept voting for him from 1937 on, over the objections of the managerial class in Mountain Brook who thought Connor was as dumb as an actual bull, and despite the scandals that accompanied his unchecked reign. The extramarital affairs. The instances grand juries viewed his police force to be as violent and thieving as any villainous enterprise. Bull survived these scandals, survived the name-calling in widely circulated criminal indictments—“dictatorial, immoral, autocratic”—and the subsequent impeachment proceedings against him, too. He concentrated his power in Birmingham because he made one promise to its white citizens: He would always remain just like them.”
― Paul Kix, You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America

“The Klan grew to monstrous proportions in Birmingham. In 1920, its chapter had twenty thousand members, the largest klavern in the nation. Whites flocked to it not because their granddaddies had lost at Gettysburg but because they themselves were hardly better off than Blacks in the here and now. That fact humiliated white people. That humiliation, while never voiced, nonetheless fueled a hatred of Black people distinct from that found in every other southern city.”
― Paul Kix, You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America

“Birmingham well into the twentieth century had more illiterate people than any other city in the nation and the lowest spendable income per citizen, too. For generations neither the Blacks nor whites got ahead, serfs to their bosses in Mountain Brook or their bosses’ bosses up north. The whites couldn’t lash out against their managers and keep their jobs, so they lashed out at Blacks.”
― Paul Kix, You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America

“Walker discussed what he and so many of those present had just endured: the SCLC’s sustained civil rights campaign in Albany, Georgia, the year prior, in 1962. It had failed completely. It had failed for numerous reasons, Walker said, but one of them was that the nonviolence the SCLC favored and had learned from Gandhi’s success in India—assembling marchers and having them sit at the seat of white power, and then not move—needed to be met by violent white authority to work.”
― Paul Kix, You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America