I bought this book online last summer and finally got around to reading it. By the time I finished the foreword I was already thinking of who I could get to read this with me. I got one taker. The rest, frankly, were missing out. Carry Me Home is a book about home, and every page is about a place I know. Sometimes it’s about a person I’ve heard about, or a person I reported on.
I’m learning all over the place. I think I also said that right from the beginning, and I’ve said it throughout. Also, I’m still reading.
Diane McWhorter grew up during the Civil Rights Movement era in Birmingham, which is to say she was a child and it was above her head at that moment in her life. She grew up over the mountain, which is to further say about six miles and a whole culture away. None of this is a criticism. We are from where we are from, and she would later spend 20 y ears on this book trying to understand her place, her people, and her father. Some of that she gets to better than others in this book, which won (and deservedly so) the Pulitzer Prize.
It’s a bit clunky sometimes, a bit dense sometimes, but it is a terrific and eye-opening read. I can’t recommend it enough.
Currently reading “Carry Me Home Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution,” by Diane McWhorter
www.simonandschuster.com/books/Carry-…
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 2, 2026 at 9:32 PM
McWhorter was thorough and unsparing.
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 2, 2026 at 9:59 PM
Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth is at the center of all of this, as he should be. A fascinating, critically important leader. He was assaulted, bombed, beaten and while creating a Movement.
He also had a saying,“If the Klan don’t get you, the police will; and if the police don’t get you, the courts will.”
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 2, 2026 at 9:59 PM
This tale is full of curious and odd and frustrating little circular ironies. That was by design, of course, even on an ad hoc basis.
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 5, 2026 at 12:36 PM
This part fascinates. I had never heard of this audit. (I mean, why would you?)
But growing up and working there, I’d always heard people stewing in that outside perspective and wondering how to overcome it.
Smyer commissioned this, waited ages for it, and then fired the firm that sent this in.
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 5, 2026 at 1:19 PM
If it feels familiar that’s because it has been used before. If it has been used before and used again that means it works.
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 6, 2026 at 4:47 PM
John Temple Graves II considered himself “a professional southerner” which had a particular cheerleader meaning at the time.
time.com/archive/6604…
He was a regionally syndicated morning columnist for a while, but found his copy dated by the afternoon. The timing of his death was something.
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 6, 2026 at 4:56 PM
Sometimes it’s just human and wryly funny.
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith.org) July 7, 2026 at 1:12 PM
I’m coming to parts of the story that more regularly entered into the wider historical context. This has long since become a story that reminds readers that the compression of history necessarily leaves so much of the story on the sidelines. Soon, we’ll get to the parts that everyone remembers, the Children’s Crusade and the Sixteenth Street Church bombing, and so on. Almost with every page now I’m wondering if the next person that is introduced will be someone that I met or knew or covered. The last one, for certain, is going to happen.
It’s a great book. I’m learning all over the place.
