You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live by Paul Kix

Author:Paul Kix
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Celadon Books

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“The whole world is watching Birmingham!” Fred Shuttlesworth shouted at that night’s mass meeting, held at Sixth Avenue Baptist. More than two thousand people looked back at him, rising and amen-ing and applauding, the largest crowd yet for any mass meeting. Fred was almost too jittery to speak. He had never been part of any protest as successful as today’s. He had woken early this morning and headed straight to the church to see that deluge of students rushing in. Fred had darted from one group of kids to the next, interrupting the final training sessions Bevel or other SCLC colleagues led to give short bursts of inspiration: “Freedom fighters,” he’d told the kids. That’s what they were. “As much so as those in the army. But without weapons.” Oh, it was wonderful to witness. The student leaders whom Bevel had handpicked—Shuttlesworth had guided Bevel to many of them. Fred knew these kids. Knew their character. Their parents. Birmingham was Fred’s town, and to see what happened today made the years of struggle—the Christmas Day bombing; the beating at all-white Phillips High; his endless encounters with Bull, many of them faced alone or with his tiny band of congregants—today redeemed all that pain. “Our little folks,” he said to the crowd at Sixth Avenue Baptist, emotion coursing through him. Those children had damn near filled the jails. No one had done that. Not one civil rights group in the whole of the movement stretching back to the 1950s. But they’d done it today in Fred’s town of Birmingham, Alabama.

Amazed himself, he repeated the number for the audience: “one thousand kids.”

James Bevel spoke, too. “There ain’t gonna be no meeting [like this] Monday night because every Negro is going to be in jail by Sunday night,” he said. He asked for a show of hands: Who’d been inspired by the children? It seemed almost two thousand arms shot up.

Then go to jail, Bevel said. He’d been many times. His wife, Diane, was incarcerated now; she’d been arrested for protesting days earlier. Bevel said he wanted everyone in jail over the weekend, “so that I can be back in Mississippi chopping cotton by Tuesday.”

Like this morning, Bevel then helped to lead the congregation in song. Two thousand people rose to their feet and the church erupted in freedom anthems. The adults left the pews and marched up and down the aisles, as if practicing what they planned to do over the weekend.

King spoke as well. “I have been inspired and moved today,” he said. He meant that literally: He’d pushed himself from his room in the Gaston in part because the afternoon could not have gone better. Peaceful protests, mass arrests, no counterviolence, no injuries. And the greatest of God’s beneficence: They were close to filling the jails. “I have never seen anything like it!” King shouted to the crowd.

For every child arrested, two or three more had come in through the back of the church, hoping to protest. “Some

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