The biggest challenge Paul Kix faced writing his first book: spies aim to leave nothing behind.
“I was chasing a ghost,” the author and journalist said regarding The Saboteur, his 2018 nonfiction text. “The point of the [WWII French] Resistance was, you will never have a paper trail … That’s why I had to go to five countries, just to piece together the raw material for this book.”
Kix, a native of the small central Iowa town of Hubbard and an Iowa State University alum, has written for a variety of publications, including ESPN The Magazine and GQ. A 2017 feature story he wrote for GQ, “The Accidental Getaway Driver,” was recently adapted as a film.
In writing his new book You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live, Kix’s interest was sparked by a resistance movement closer to home than World War II France.
The May 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and the protests for justice that followed had a personal dimension for Kix. He is married to a Black woman, and the couple are raising their three children in Kix’s new home-state of Connecticut. He found himself wanting to write a book on “how to live with courage and ingenuity” in turbulent times.
His mind turned to Birmingham, Alabama in the spring of 1963.
“It sets in motion the Civil Rights Act of ‘64, it sets in motion the Voting Rights Act, it sets in motion [Martin Luther King, Jr.’s] own martyrdom in ‘68,” he said. “It sets in motion a new life for this country.”
The Birmingham campaign represented a non-violent challenge from civil rights groups to the racist power structures in, perhaps, the most segregated city in the U.S. at the time.
During that campaign King was jailed, along with thousands of other activists and demonstrators, many of whom were children. It was during that imprisonment that King wrote his famed “Letter from Birmingham Jail”.
You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live was published in May, and recounts the 10 weeks of the Birmingham campaign, spearheaded by figures such as King, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and Rev. James Bevel.
As Kix describes it, the campaign was a last-ditch effort following various degrees of failure up to that point to achieve a real implementation of civil rights for Black Americans.
“If they failed to win in Birmingham, there was an equally large threat of the SCLC [The Southern Christian Leadership Conference] – King’s organization – faltering and dying,” said Kix. “There was the larger threat that, if that happened, the larger Civil Rights Movement might die with it … Those are the stakes going into those 10 weeks.”
Unlike the subjects of The Saboteur, the people Kix was writing about this time wanted their actions to be broadcast to the world. The problem, though, was that not everyone wanted that message heard.
“The Birmingham [news coverage] was awful, it was racist, it was white, it actually barely covered the protest at all,” Kix said. “When the publications did … it was always really sneering and always really editorialized.”
While a Black-owned newspaper, The Birmingham Times, would be created in 1964, the major Alabama newspapers at that time did not have any Black reporters.
The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and the Birmingham Public Library began assembling an oral history of the campaign some years later. These recordings and transcripts retell the events of those 10 weeks according to the people who were involved and proved to be a vital resource for Kix.
Kix will be at the Central Library on Tuesday as the penultimate visitor in the Des Moines Public Library’s 2023 AViD series. The speaker series is organized by Tim Paluch, the library’s marketing and communications supervisor who overlapped with Kix during his time at the Iowa State Daily, ISU’s student newspaper.
“The last couple of months he got Emily St. John Mandel, who’s arguably my favorite novelist today,” said Kix of this year’s AViD line-up. “Jack Carr, I love his fiction … the way he writes about the military is awesome. [Paluch] is getting really big names so I’m thrilled to know him and thrilled to be able to take part in this.”
Paul Kix will be speaking at the Central Library on Tuesday, June 6. The event starts at 7 p.m., and is free and open to the public.
