Back to Birmingham
Journalist and historian Diane McWhorter decided to re-issue her prize-winning book, “Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution,” after she discovered new materials on the subject, and after she visited the Buchenwald concentration camp with her two children. In a presentation on Wednesday as part of the Colloquium Series of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, where McWhorter is a Caperton Fellow, she recounted her moving visit to the notorious death camp. She was particularly affected by photographs of civilians from the neighboring town of Weimar, who were bused to the camp after the war to be confronted with the atrocities. In observing the denial and willful amnesia of some of these residents, McWhorter said she was forced to look at her own attitudes growing up in a prominent family in a segregated Birmingham. “Carry Me Home” was first published in 2001, chronicling the attempts at Civil Rights...