Sign up for our newsletters to receive our Best of 2024 ezine!

Reviews by Alice Copeland Brown

Order Reviews by:
Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution
by Diane McWhorter
Too bad she didn't live it (10/24/2009)
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).
  • Page
  • 1

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Small Rain
    Small Rain
    by Garth Greenwell
    At the beginning of Garth Greenwell's novel Small Rain, the protagonist, an unnamed poet in his ...
  • Book Jacket: Daughters of Shandong
    Daughters of Shandong
    by Eve J. Chung
    Daughters of Shandong is the debut novel of Eve J. Chung, a human rights lawyer living in New York. ...
  • Book Jacket: The Women
    The Women
    by Kristin Hannah
    Kristin Hannah's latest historical epic, The Women, is a story of how a war shaped a generation ...
  • Book Jacket: The Wide Wide Sea
    The Wide Wide Sea
    by Hampton Sides
    By 1775, 48-year-old Captain James Cook had completed two highly successful voyages of discovery and...

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
In Our Midst
by Nancy Jensen
In Our Midst follows a German immigrant family’s fight for freedom after their internment post–Pearl Harbor.
Who Said...

It is always darkest just before the day dawneth

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Big Holiday Wordplay 2024

Enter Now

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.