Book Summary and Reviews of Carry Me Home by Diane McWhorter

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Alice Copeland Brown

Too bad she didn't live it
As a Birmingham child of the 60s, participating in lunch counter integrations, civil rights marches and continual if fruitless letter-writing campaigns, I find some of her interviewees somewhat self-serving in their comments. I was born in segregated Birmingham, and knew no other childhood but one in which the pulpits were screamingly silent on the subject of the evil of segregation, the law of our state. I drank from 'colored' water fountains, expecting to be arrested. I went into a colored bar, and no one would speak to me, terrified of what I could be....the danger I represented as a white woman to black men who had seen too many of their own decorating the limbs of trees for even whistling at a white woman.

When I asked my mother why black people sat on the back of the bus, and why the bus driver would move the colored/white sign back when the bus got crowded, forcing the black people to stand so whites could sit down, she said, "Because that's the way it is".

When I wrote my high school term paper on : "Segregation: the Economic, Psychological and Moral Harm to White People", researching the sociologists on the subject, my classmates would counter every argument on integration and pre-judging people by the color of their skin with "Because they stink!!!". And despite integration, Birmingham has re-segregated: Hoover is the 3rd largest city in Alabama, adjacent to mostly black Birmingham dur to white flight. To where? Hoover, Al.

The resentment to Pres. Obama is fueled by deep-seated hatred and feelings of inferiority from my fellow white Southerners. All the while saying: "Jesus loves you and me" (so long as you're white).