Not Always Civil

This column was published March 21-22, 2025 in the Manhattan Mercury.

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In the spring of 1963, I was finishing kindergarten at Plainville Rural Grade School. At the same time I was washing down a graham cracker with a half pint of Meadow Gold whole milk, followed by a nap on a kid-sized floor mat, children in Birmingham, Alabama were risking their lives for equality and justice.

Just finished a book about that spring, called “You Have to be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live.” Written by journalist Paul Kix, it’s the best nonfiction book I’ve consumed in years (“consumed,” not “read,” because I listened to the audiobook version and truth and accuracy still matters).

Kix has taken what are arguably ten of the most influential weeks that helped form American race relations today and drilled several strata deeper than my headline-driven knowledge. Before the book, my awareness of the events of Birmingham was limited to images of dogs attacking protesters, fire hoses violently trained on Black Americans and the Kennedy brothers finally coming around on civil rights.

It's also a case study in Pre-Internet/Dawn of Television (my caps) historical perception management, when messages were delivered, and public opinion formed through the filter of the mainstream news media. Think hard copy above-the-fold New York Times and 16 millimeter film leading the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite at the dinner hour.   

20th century Kansas demographics being what they were, I didn’t meet a Black person until our family moved from Plainville to Wichita in 1966, and then only because of school integration through forced busing. White kids, including my younger brother, were bused from our lily-white corner of town, which was actually called Pleasant Valley, to Black neighborhood schools, and vice-versa.    

Welcome to the Land of Baloney on White Bread with Miracle Whip. Now, assimilate. 

My brother thrived at the erstwhile Black school and could have been a poster child for forced integration. He adored his teacher, and his class was like something right out of Sesame Street.

Chas. Moore/New York Times

The book also unearthed new and deeper truth about the Kennedy brothers. Even through the early violence in Birmingham, John F. Kennedy viewed civil rights through a Cold War prism. Photos of Birmingham Black children attacked by police dogs and fire hoses on the front page of Pravda handed the Soviets a powerful argument in the swaying of Third World hearts and minds.

But it was brother Bobby, his Attorney General, who finally brought the president around to the human dignity argument, after his own about-face on civil rights. Birmingham moved RFK from designated a--hole (every administration needs one), to empath, a bright line that only became more incandescent after the president was assassinated that fall.

Kix’s book also offered new depths of understanding about Martin Luther King, Jr., whose motivation could always be traced upstream to faith. Not only was non-violence the lone effective strategy to upend centuries of a segregated social system in the face of southern white racist horrors, it is also what King’s Creator expected of him.

The title of Kix's book, “You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live,” is a line of bravado spoken by Fred Shuttlesworth, a local Black pastor and one of the organizers of the Birmingham spring of 1963, but it was the Black children and teenagers who put their lives on the line.

When so much of what we see emanating from the executive branch of American government today seems counter to that spirit, the winter of 2025 seemed like a good time for me to listen to that book.

Mike Matson’s column appears every other weekend in The Mercury, and he hosts ‘Within Reason,’ weekdays at 9 a.m. on NewsRadio KMAN. Follow his writings at mikematson.com