A review by jenswagner
You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America by Paul Kix

5.0

This book about the Birmingham campaign in the 1960s civil rights movement has felt particularly helpful in this moment, giving insight into the complexity and moral quandaries and simple unknowingness of movement and social justice work. Looking back everything often feels inevitable, that it was meant to go the way it did, but this book shows how conviction and chaos and hope and chance and intention and willingness to take terrifying risks in the face of the unknown working out is the best we can usually hope for. Because of the messiness, it gave me hope.

Also I learned a lot and the book gave depth and truth to the very real horrors of being Black in Birmingham, the south, and the country - and the intense bravery and fortitude of those willing to challenge the system.