Birmingham is here!!!!

This is a big day for me! After years of waiting I can finally announce that my novel Birmingham is available!

It’s at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, in both ebook and paperback formats.

The novel is set in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963–fifty years ago, when Martin Luther King joined Fred Shuttlesworth in leading what is sometimes referred to as the children’s crusade. This was a turning point for the civil rights movement–children facing into the dogs and firehoses of the Birmingham police.

My story begins with a white seminary student who shows up to help the protests–penniless, naive, idealistic. He gets taken in by the movement and put to work, even though his presence is both illegal and dangerous. Chris Wright is his name, and as the protests advance over weeks of turmoil and frustration, he gets entangled with a faction of the Ku Klux Klan and with Dorcas Jones, a young, hard-nosed agitator.

I wrote the novel because I find these events so fascinating, and so easily forgotten. It was much more complicated than the view you will get from the 50th anniversary celebrations this May!

In many ways, our nation was on trial. We came through–but only because of the courage and vision of countless individuals, mostly poor, Bible-believing African-Americans. This was not a triumph of the elites. It was a triumph of the powerless and the despised.

Please buy Birmingham for yourself and all your friends and relations. If you like it, please write a brief review on Amazon (or any other website). If you have a blog, please feature the book. If you have a book group, please consider reading Birmingham together.

He Was a Man

The news that Fred Shuttlesworth died got lost in the flow when Steve Jobs died shortly thereafter. Not to take anything away from Jobs, whom I admired (I was there for his 2005 Stanford graduation speech, and it was certainly the best such I have ever heard–very thoughtful). But Shuttlesworth was the more important, and the more valiant, figure. I’ve read everything I can find on Shuttlesworth, who was one of the great heroes of the civil rights movement. This piece by Diane McWhorter does him justice. (Her book on Birmingham, Alabama, Carry Me Home, is one of my favorites of the many fine books on the movement.) Shuttlesworth is the basis of one of my main characters in the novel I intend to publish next year, Birmingham.

One thing McWhorter doesn’t mention is that Shuttlesworth was a preacher who took the Bible as God’s literal word. He never bought into liberal theology the way King did, nor was he the kind of preacher who used the pulpit for his own purposes and quoted the Bible when it suited his program. The Bible’s vision of justice was his vision, and he took it straight.