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| PULITZER WINNER: NONFICTION | |
 April 18, 2002 
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MARGARET WARNER: This year's Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction went to Diane McWhorter for her book "Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama-- The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution." Martin Luther King once called McWhorter's native Birmingham "the most segregated city in the America." Others called it "bombing-ham" for its many incidents of racially motivated bombings. McWhorter was ten years old in 1963, when the city's police dogs and fire hoses were set upon civil rights marchers, and four young black girls died in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. Her book is a richly detailed portrait of the forces and personalities that shaped her city, and of her own family's role in that history. And welcome, Diane McWhorter, and congratulations. DIANE McWHORTER: Thank you so much. MARGARET WARNER: How did you hear the news that you had won? DIANE McWHORTER: Well, I actually heard from a friend an hour before it was announced, and I thought I was going to faint, and really I felt like I was going to throw up, I was so shocked. And my body started tingling, and I felt like I had left my body. It was just... it was such a total thrill. MARGARET WARNER: Well, now, this was a massive research project. You worked on it for over a decade. What inspired you to take it on? DIANE McWHORTER: Well, actually it was almost two decades that I worked on it. Well, I think there were two things. One was that I realized that my father was a very interesting and strange person, and I never really understood him. He was the sort of downwardly mobile black sheep of this prominent Birmingham family, and I really needed to find out why he had turned out the way he did. And the second reason was that I really couldn't quite believe that the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing had never been solved, that people that my cohort in Birmingham considered a lunatic fringe, a bunch of "rednecks" had really gotten away with this crime. And I wanted to understand how it had happened and why it had happened in my hometown. MARGARET WARNER: And what you found, of course, is that the business and social elite that your family was a part of was intimately connected-- and for decades-- with this fringe, with the KKK, with the police, with this whole history of the violent racial incidents. DIANE McWHORTER: That's right. I was really shocked at the extent to which the conspiracy was explicit. I had initially thought that the Klan and the industrials who had made Birmingham the heavy manufacturing center of the deep South were... that they just shared interests and that there was sort of an understanding. But actually orders were given, money changed hands, and it was really... it was quite an explicit collaboration. MARGARET WARNER: Now, you wrote that your grandfather was intimately involved in this in a certain way. Tell us about that. DIANE McWHORTER: Well he was a Harvard-educated lawyer for the Alabama power company, and he was not really that political, but he was the... a member of the kitchen cabinet of a man by the name of James Simpson, who was a very prominent corporation lawyer and state Senator, who was the handler of Bull Connor, whom most people know as the cartoon villain of the civil rights era. He was the public safety commissioner of Birmingham who sicced the dogs and fire hoses on the child demonstrators in the spring of 1963, when Dr. Martin Luther King mounted the segregation-ending demonstrations and marches in Birmingham. So my father was a friend and colleague of Mr. Simpson. MARGARET WARNER: Your grandfather. DIANE McWHORTER: My grandfather, correct. MARGARET WARNER: Your grandfather. How hard was it for you to confront your city's past and your family's role in it? DIANE McWHORTER: Interestingly, my father, who is this rather grandiose character, and maybe even a frustrated writer, had always wanted to have his story told. Probably not the one I told, but he was a very daring skin diver and had many brushes with death. And I think that was the story he wanted to have written about him. But he really encouraged me and gave me permission to do this, and was pretty free about telling me about his beliefs at the time, which were... he was outspokenly bigoted. He was sort of beyond the social pale for his class of country clubbers, and he was... I'm so grateful that he enabled me to tell his story, and really encouraged me. I taped him. He wasn't... he wasn't particularly ashamed of what he had done, or apologetic, but he... the man he became is really a stranger to the person he was in 1963. MARGARET WARNER: But a continuing thread in this book is your fear that he is a member of the Ku Klux Klan and had himself been involved in violence. DIANE McWHORTER: That's right. He carried a gun under the front seat of his car, and I... he would be out at night going to what he called civil rights meetings. And by that he meant meetings to plot to stop the civil rights movement. So we would find Klan literature in his office sometime, and I was afraid that he... my worst fear was that he was a member of the Klan and had been involved in some of the... some of those landmark episodes that I wrote about, like the freedom riders' beating. And I really didn't think he had been involved in the church bombing, but that would have been the worst-case scenario. MARGARET WARNER: You finally confronted him, and that comes at the end of the book. Tell us about that. DIANE McWHORTER: Well, I went to his office. I had tape-recorded him on many occasions, and finally I said to him, "Pop, I've just got to know what you were doing." And he still... he remains slippery. He said that he... I said, "Were you in a Klan?" He said, "well, I was connected with everybody. I was connected with the John Birch Society, the CIA, the FBI," And on and on. So interestingly, I never really pinned him Down and I really never solved the mystery of my father. But in trying to, I had to recreate the history of two races, so at least I got something out of it. I got a few answers. MARGARET WARNER: Did you satisfy yourself that he had not killed anyone? DIANE McWHORTER: I did. I did. That had been my worst fear, and I don't think... I don't think I really thought he could have, this father that I loved. But I was... that had been my worst fear, because of the gun and his outspoken racial views. MARGARET WARNER: When you won the Pulitzer, you were quoted as saying-- and I want to quote it exactly-- "I'm probably the first person in the world to say I'm so lucky to be from Birmingham, Alabama." DIANE McWHORTER: Mm-hmm. MARGARET WARNER: Explain that. It sounds like you're pretty conflicted about that. DIANE McWHORTER: I got into a little trouble in Birmingham for saying that. It was something of a cheap shot. What I meant was that I was sort of satirizing the reputation that Birmingham has had over the years as being the worst place on earth, and a lot of people who go there think that if you... you're going to see dogs on the streets attacking black people. But I think the theme of the book is, out of this place where a lot of bad things happened, this majestic, Democratic uprising took place, and one could not have happened with the other. So I was sort of Making a flippant reference to the fact that, wow, if it hadn't been for Birmingham, I never would have done this; I never would have been entrusted with the story of this incredible place. But by saying "I'm probably the first person...", I was kind of joking about the reputation... the reputation that it has suffered over the years. MARGARET WARNER: How did people in Birmingham react even when the book came out and it revealed so much, particularly about the people who had been friends of your family, the group you were from? DIANE McWHORTER: Well, the official reaction and the reaction that I've heard has been extremely favorable. I went Down to Birmingham for the King holiday and addressed 3,000 people at the city's official observance of the King national holiday. So I've been... the book has been really embraced to an extent that has surprised me by the city fathers. I was very touched to get some flowers from the Chamber of Commerce when I won the Pulitzer. So to that extent, Birmingham has really changed a lot, and it's embracing its past. The subterranean reaction among the people in the suburb that I grew up in has been I think rage, that I'm a traitor to my class. Somebody said, "I can't believe how blunt she is." I think there's a sense that I was rude, perhaps, for naming the names of prominent citizens. But what I really tried to do is be... also tell secrets of myself and be really frank about how benighted I was, and I certainly was during that period, and for quite a time afterwards. So I think that that has maybe... and the fact that I wrote the book, I believe, out of acceptance of what the city was like, how problematic the history was-- that I think people are... may be coming around to accepting that too. MARGARET WARNER: Diane McWhorter, thank you, and again, congratulations. DIANE McWHORTER: Thank you so much. |
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