Carry Me Home

Diane McWhorter grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, in a prominent white family, and Carry Me Home is both a history of the city's central role in the civil rights movement and her own reckoning with how directly her family's world was entangled in the segregation that movement was fighting to end. The book follows Birmingham through the early 1960s, the years of public safety commissioner Bull Connor, the campaign that brought Martin Luther King Jr. to the city, the children's marches, and the violence, including bombings, that made Birmingham a name recognized across the country as the civil rights struggle's most dangerous flashpoint.

McWhorter reports the movement's public history with the scope of a full scale narrative history, but the book's distinguishing move is turning that same reporting on her own family and social circle, tracing threads of complicity, financial, social and sometimes more direct, that connected people she had grown up around to the resistance her hometown mounted against integration. That personal thread runs through the book without softening the larger history it sits inside, and McWhorter treats her own family's story as one more piece of evidence about how deeply segregation was embedded in Birmingham's respectable, prosperous white society rather than confined to its most extreme defenders.

At substantial length, the book combines deep archival and interview research with a memoirist's willingness to implicate her own family directly, and it suits a reader interested in civil rights history told partly from inside the community that resisted it rather than only from the movement's own side. It rewards a reader prepared for a personal reckoning alongside the historical narrative rather than a purely external account.