Bringing history to life with Paul Kix
An interview with the author about his book "You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live"
We love to celebrate historical figures in America. We love to give them a holiday or put their face on our currency. We’ve done a great job of pulling our history apart and making it more palatable for the masses, but in the wake of that thought experiment we’ve lost the important details about people and the events that made them important. We’ve created false narratives, or, more likely, taken the narrative apart and forgotten the story altogether.
For journalist and author Paul Kix, piecing the narrative together and telling the facts as a story — as something other than pieces and parts, embellishments and left-out details — is the point of narrative nonfiction (sometimes called literary nonfiction, creative nonfiction, new journalism, etc.). Kix brings the story to life. He not only searches for the truth, but also the story that created the truth. He’s a true narrative writer who focuses on breaking the patchwork history we are told and creating something new and original from it that stands apart because he writes a STORY.
Kix has spent his professional career breaking down the structures of great storytelling and used the knowledge he’s gleaned from picking over stories to his benefit. He’s edited and ushered in some of the great magazine stories of the 21st century and worked with writers across sports and city magazines to bring life to the feature story. He’s also written his fair share. His first book, The Saboteur, was lauded for its storytelling and DreamWorks optioned it. His 2017 GQ story “The Accidental Getaway Driver” has already been turned into a movie.
This year, Kix’s second book arrived and it’s a page-turner that retraces 10 weeks of American history that have often been turned into a footnote in the Civil Rights Movement. You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America is a re-telling of the The Birmingham campaign, which was organized by Martin Luther King Jr., James Bevel, Fred Shuttlesworth, Wyatt Walker and others in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1963.
The nonviolent campaign shocked America, and the Kennedy presidency, into acknowledging and acting on changing discrimination laws. While those ten weeks have often been rendered down to photos of young Black students being attacked by dogs and drenched with water from powerful fire hoses, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, those weeks were more important to American history than we remember. They were also nearly undone on more than one occasion. And Kix uses the story we know as a platform to jump off and fill in the gaps not with more facts, but by using the narrative arc of the days and weeks, he creates a fuller and richer picture of what happened during one of the most important protests in American history.
In Kix’s hands, the story comes alive. The characters are rich in texture. He doesn’t overkill the space, but propels action forward. He renders the scenes as a cinematographer wielding the camera and an editor piecing together the past, present, and future. He melds the layers by bringing in back story and, more importantly, letting the reader know when a record doesn’t exist because something happened behind closed doors or during private phone calls.
You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live is a staggering work of historical nonfiction and literary journalism.
You Have To Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live was named one of The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2023.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
One of the issues I often have with a lot of non-fiction books and even magazine stories is we want be taken so seriously and it is a serious topic, but it is still a story. And that's the thing that is often missing. And with this book, you're narrating in a way to tell a story and you're not trying to explain.
Thank you for saying that. The prologue kind of makes it clear that, especially after the kids were born and in particular my twin boys, I really wanted to verse myself with the Black canon in ways that I hadn't before. As a result of that, I just delved deep into the Civil Rights canon, which is arguably the richest in American letters outside of maybe the Civil War. And one thing kept appearing over and over to me, which was, man, those 10 weeks in Birmingham were amazing, and yet I had never seen a flat out story of them. It was always framed that this was one campaign in many, which was opposed to the way that I saw it: a hundred years of failure after the Emancipation Proclamation. And depending on when you actually qualify the start of the Civil Rights movement, 10 weeks in Birmingham happened and everything in America changes in ways that we still feel today. And I was like, well, let's tell that origin story.
I see it not only as the origin story of the Civil Rights Movement — the real and true starting point — but really I see it as the origin story of America. I think in 1963, that was the first time that America began to truly grapple with what it meant to be equal. Now, does that grappling continue? Yes. That's in part why I wrote the prologue and the epilogue the way that I did. I wanted to show the first story, the genesis. I mean, that's why part one is called “Genesis.”
Let's talk about the intro and how you end up with all of this information. We are taught about Martin Luther King Jr. Every president, no matter who they are, since his death has given us the MLK Jr. Day statement, right? They've given us that same thing. We've been told about him. We've seen the clip of that 30 seconds from that speech in Washington D.C., but we never know the man. And what you do a great job at is diving into not only him, but the people around him. So how did you get all this information together and where did you start?
It really started years before, so it started with, in case anyone hasn’t read the book, I'm white, my wife is Black, our kids are Black — have a daughter and twin boys. The twins were born in 2011 and it’s after that that I start to read all of these books. And it wasn't just from the Civil Rights Movement, there were books going back to, again, the Civil War reconstruction. The list doesn't matter. The point is really that I began to see, wow, in certain parts of certain books, you got the sense that these guys had massive egos. And that fascinated me because I'm like, ‘these are men of the cloth.’ These are not only men of the cloth, but these are in some cases martyrs in their own sense — the way that we view King today — and yet how flawed they were in real life.
It goes above and beyond just the sort of adultery that King was later shown to have carried out. It's pettier stuff, like the day to day, 'I don't like this dude today,’ sort of stuff, and basically everybody in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was dealing with it.
There's this tenet that I believe is true of storytelling — which I also believe is true of life — is it is not in our heroism that we are inspired by, it is our flaws because in our flaws we relate to each other. And, by the way, if flawed people also happen to be heroic, all the better.
Everybody already knew that these guys were heroes, so I wanted to lean into the flaws and show that they were just like you and me and in that way have them relate to you. If this book succeeds, it's not only a narrative of those 10 weeks, but in some sense — and really this is why I dedicated it to my kids — it's a guide for how any of us can live, how we can have perseverance, how we can have courage, how we can have kindness. And the only way to gain access to that is to first start with, ‘in what ways were these people just like you and me?
There were a lot of small details of these 10 weeks that I have never been told. Did something get released? Was there some information that you were able to get that we’ve forgotten or missed? Sending kids to march is never talked about.
It isn't [talked about]. When it's framed it's always like, these kids are out there, but what is skipped over is these kids willingly went out there. And even more than that, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference knowingly put them out there hoping that basically the brutality with which white people had always visited upon Blacks, especially southern white people, would be visited upon these Black people today who happen to be Black children. So there's a callousness to the SCLC’s calculation that I found deeply riveting as a storyteller and also sort of deeply troubling.
Now, he [Wyatt Walker, the executive director of SCLC] would say, “I had to do this because a hundred years of separate but equal, a hundred years of inequality, a hundred years of oppression, damnit, you're going to do what's necessary so this time you can win.”
To your earlier point. How did I find this stuff? First off, yes, there were certain documents that were released in the last 10 to 15 years that a lot of previous historians didn't have, and that's because the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and the Birmingham Public Library did a tremendous job over the last 10 to 15 to 20 years of interviewing everybody possible who had any ties to the spring of 1963. Once I found out that there was this massive oral history project carried out by both of those institutions, I went down to Birmingham.
And, honestly, some of this fell in the pandemic, and because of the pandemic, the Birmingham Public Library and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute had begun to release more and more of these oral histories — videos with participants in the late 90s or early 2000s or just the transcripts from those same conversations — online knowing that people like me wouldn't have access to them for a while. It was weeks, if not months, of poring over that stuff.
There's another way to answer that question too, which is I approach this as a story. I approach this as a narrative: How can I tell those 10 weeks as a narrative? That set me apart from so many historians who proceeded me, who wanted to tell some sort of exhaustive history — I'm going to tell you everything there is to know on this topic or whatever. The problem with that is that it has so much minutia. What I did was basically just say, ‘okay, let me find the minutia that's relevant to me and this story and then basically abandon everything that's not.’ That's what I tried to do more than anything else. And so that's why in the acknowledgements, I make pains to say how much I am indebted to the Birmingham Public Library and also the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and also the academic books or the more mass market books whose aim was different than mine. I am indebted to them because we had different aims, but I took what I could from them and I greatly, greatly benefited from them.
That was what I found interesting. You don't spend time explaining what people are doing. You're like, they did this; that's what they did. No, here is the long reason why. We need to have faith in the reader that they can figure out why people are doing things. Something I've been trying to solve is: How much faith do you place in a reader? You show immense amounts of faith in this book.
The main objective is always the story with my books. If my books succeed, they work in the same way as the books by people who are my idols: David Grann, Laura Hillenbrand. Let's take some of Grann's books and you look at his notes, they're massive, pages upon pages of notes. This is the second book I've published, and the first book, The Saboteur was only 220 pages long but it had 70 pages of notes for one very specific reason: because I knew people were going to be like, there's no way this shit actually happened. I'm going to be like, “yes it did, and here's all the notes.” I'm not going to do the thing that so many nonfiction authors do, which is, let me show all my work here. That's going to drag down the story. I want to give you the story. If you want the history, if you want the citations, please, I'm going to include all of them.
I did not come up with this. It's me reading people like Hillenbrand and Grann. I have not read Michael Lewis's latest book, and he's kind of getting pummeled right now because of it, but I will say that Michael Lewis, especially with Moneyball and other books like that, was hugely influential for how to weave narrative around a huge amount of information. That's what I'm after.
The idea of respecting the reader is one I take seriously. The way I try to do it — and maybe this is beneficial for anybody that wants to write either magazine pieces or books — is I took something from Walter Isaacson. Isaacson is an example of somebody who does some sort of exhaustive histories, but if you read his Benjamin Franklin book or his DaVinci book, he talked about what he wanted to do with these people who were dead was basically treat these characters as if he was a journalist and as if he could question them. It meant going to Benjamin Franklin and asking what was it like when you were at Boston Latin in high school? I wanted to do the same thing with King. Now, of course, I can't ask Martin Luther King Jr. [anything], but if I pose a question to myself, then what I can do is seek out his numerous books or books written about him or the numerous interviews he gave and try to find some sort of answer to that underlying question. And when I do, I've sort of satisfied my journalist curiosity and I can ask that follow-up question of King. I did that with him. I did that with Fred Shuttlesworth. I did that with James Bevel. I did that with Wyatt Walker. I'm just trying to understand these people on their terms and I'm trying to treat them as if I can still talk to them.
I got lucky because the Civil Rights canon is as deep as it is and because this thing has been written about so often and because these participants have themselves often written books or participated in documentaries or sat for massive oral history projects or done some combination of all of those things. Something I heard all the time: How did you get inside their head? I got inside their head because they were inside their head. They talked about what it was like at this time. They talked about their motivation whenever they did something. I'm just quoting back to the reader what I had come across in the research.
Which is important because you do need, there are people that write from someone's head and it's not a direct quote and when reading nonfiction, I’ll stop reading because I know it’s not true. Here, because you source and cite and also have direct quotes and will acknowledge when you don’t know something, it pays off. It makes me trust you when you go into something like King’s education, which is a fascinating section that is often glossed over, and the questions he grapples with as a human being about what he wants in life. And this helps as you read the rest of the book because it points to King's answers and allows a reader to trust you.
You can build that to your advantage. You can say, ‘we don't know’.
Before this conversation, I was trying to think what I could tell people to do themselves. I think you actually lean into [not knowing something], and especially if the historical record doesn't support it. You lean into it and you say, “we don't know.“ There's conversations with Fred [Shuttleworth] that I would've loved. There's a one snippet toward the end where Shuttlesworth is super angry and he goes into the back room and he talks with Bobby Kennedy and when he comes out, he's a completely changed guy. We don't know what happened in that conversation. Nothing in the historical record. I say as much, but what I do say is what I know, what the historical record did say about each of these men — each of their motivations, each of the sort of complexes they had about having to stand in the shadows of larger figures and what that did to them — and even though we don't know the outcome, we know that Fred changed his opinion and his demeanor. He calmed down. Something Bobby said flipped him. And because I'm clear on what we don't know, I then try to lean into a little bit of what we do know that might suggest what they could have discussed.
Yeah, it's a really interesting technique and thing that I don't think a lot of people ever want to admit – that they don't know something. You have exhaustive notes, you have all this time spent on this and it's like, I can't admit I don't know it. It's something I struggle with constantly as a writer. I have to know the answer and then I'll look it up and I'll spend hours and sometimes weeks or maybe even months thinking about something and be like, I don't know that answer.
And you can't sometimes, especially if they're dead, or if the records are closed or if there's simply no record of what this thing was. You can't know.
You set out to write this and it seems like during the pandemic it really kicked in like, I'm going to do this now. Was this something you were just kind of kicking around and hanging onto, or is this something you were just like, I got the itch and now I'm going to do it instantly?
So it's funny, it comes back to my kids.
Everything comes back to kids. It always does.
Always does. I spent some time reading the Civil Rights canon, and this is like 2013, 2014, and I basically came to the conclusion that, holy shit, the Birmingham Campaign, Project, Confrontation, as it was more colloquially known, is easily the most fascinating 10 weeks, not only of the Civil Rights Movement, but probably in the 20th century of America. I left it at that because I'm like, I don't know what to do with that. I was working on another book at the time. I had other obligations. So the first book comes out and I am thinking of other books I might want to pursue. This isn't even one of them. Then George Floyd happens and then my kids, as the prologue shows, are asking really hard questions about what it means for them to be Black in America.
It's not as if Sonny and I don't try to answer those questions, but they kind of go unanswered despite our best efforts. Sonny and I both decide, well, maybe the best answer lies in the historical record in the way people like them acted in the past. That's when I started seriously.
The parallels aren't perfect, but it's a how-to guide for whatever the moment. However insurmountable it seems or however depressing it seems, or however fearful you are, there's a way you can respond with dignity and with courage, and there's a way that you can win the day when it seems as though you cannot. It was those 10 weeks in Birmingham, and suddenly it was like, okay, if I use my own experience as the framework to then set up this historical narrative, maybe it's not just inspiring my kids, maybe it's actually also inspiring other readers as they go through it.