Eugene and Jan Peterson

It’s always a pleasure to hear from appreciative readers, but it’s a very special joy to get a letter from those I deeply admire. Eugene Peterson and his wife Jan gave me permission to quote this response to Birmingham:

We read this book together over the past two months and feel we have been immersed in a distant world that we had only known previously through the public media.

Jan was born in Birmingham and grew up with a few black playmates. Eugene grew up in an almost completely white world. He only knew one black person, who later became the best man in their wedding. Our only experience with Martin Luther King was listening to his “I Have a Dream” address at Morgan State University in Baltimore.

Which is to say that the world of racial discrimination and violence was almost entirely “black and white.” Tim’s novel introduced us to the enormous complexity introduced by the “movement”–moderate whites, moderate blacks, militant whites, militant blacks, the KKK, fearful blacks, naive idealistic whites. Narrated through the alternating first-person voices of a young black woman, Dorcas, and a young white man, Chris, the tension builds page by page.

We both feel that for two months we experienced the closest thing to being there without being there.

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.

Blood Done Sign My Name

I want to strongly recommend a great book, Blood Done Sign My Name, by Timothy Tyson. He’s a professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and this is a memoir of growing up white in the small-town South.

Tyson’s father was a socially liberal Methodist minister who acted bravely in opposing racism in the church during the Sixties. His son tells some moving stories about that. Ultimately, that benign liberalism proved inadequate for the hard-core racism in another North Carolina town where Tyson went to elementary school. The centerpiece of the story is a murder. A storeowner killed a black man in cold blood, before multiple witnesses, and then was acquitted by an all-white jury. Firebombs subsequently torched some of the largest buildings in town. It’s hard to believe this all happened in 1970, long after Birmingham and Selma and the March on Washington.

Tyson’s purpose is to bear witness to the gritty, violent changes that took place in America over race. These are very different from our heart-warming memories of a truth-telling preacher Martin Luther King and his embrace by a conscience-stricken white America. Tyson wants to remind us that Southern blacks had plenty of guns, which they sometimes used to defend themselves, and that many were far too angry to stick to King’s creed of nonviolence. Nor, on the other hand, were whites changed by their recognition of the sin of racism. Almost all whites, Tyson maintains, chose tribe over creed, whether they went to Sunday school or not. They only developed a conscience about race when they realized their society and economy would be destroyed if they carried on the status quo.

The book is remarkable on several counts. One, Tyson witnessed some extraordinary events, and he has done some hard investigative history work to fill in what he did not witness. Second, he is a very good writer and storyteller. Third, as a serious historian he puts these events in a broader context. Some of what he tells about the history of the South in the late 19th and early 20^th century is new to me and will be to most readers, I think.

Tyson obviously has a soft spot for his father’s patient, Christian idealism, but he wants to say it’s not enough. Societies change when somebody makes them change, and hard-nosed politics is needed. (In some way or another, too, guns are the hardware for which politics is the software.) He has more questions than answers, but his own urgent idealism, tied to his intimate knowledge of people and places, made this a great read for me.