Paul KIx / to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Live

It’s one of the iconic photographs of American history: A Black teenager, a policeman and his lunging German Shepherd. Birmingham, Alabama, May of 1963. In May of 2020, as reporter Paul Kix stared at a different photo–that of a Minneapolis police officer suffocating George Floyd–he kept returning to the other photo taken half a century earlier, haunted by its echoes. What, Kix wondered, was the full legacy of the Birmingham photo? And of the campaign it stemmed from?

In You Have To Be Prepared To Die Before You Can Begin To Live, Nonfiction author and journalist Paul Kix takes the reader behind the scenes as he tells the story of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s pivotal 10 week campaign, Project C, as it was known― in 1963 to end segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. At the same time, he also provides a window into the minds of the four extraordinary men who led the campaign―Martin Luther King, Jr., Wyatt Walker, Fred Shuttlesworth, and James Bevel.

Join us when journalist Paul Kix shares the story of Project C, which provides a crucial understanding of our own time and the impact that strategic activism can have.

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