Black and White FAQs

1. Why did you choose these two men as your subjects? What was the impetus for writing this book?

A. I'm never sure if I choose a topic or if a topic chooses me. That said, however, I first encountered these two men while researching and writing Birmingham Sunday. I realized that the Birmingham movement owed its success to the Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth and that he had a perfect foil in the commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene "Bull" Connor. As I explained to my editor, it was a case of David versus Goliath, Good versus Evil, Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth versus Bull Connor. Little to nothing had been written about either man for young readers, yet they were critical players in the civil rights movement. I'm not certain how different history would have been had these two men not lived in the same place at the same time, but surely it would have been different.

2. Reverend Shuttlesworth and Bull Connor were polar opposites on opposite sides of history. Did Connor ever change his mind and soften his attitude?

A. Sadly, Bull Connor remained a staunch racist and segregationist throughout his life. People who knew him said his attitudes about race hardened and became even more severe as he aged.

3. What about the conflict between these two men helped shape our world today?

A. First, you have to understand that these two men had a symbiotic relationship. Bull Connor used Fred's frequent calls for an end to segregation to get reelected to his position as commissioner of Public Safety, which put him in charge of the police and fire departments. Fred used Bull's absolute demand that the races remain apart, even after segregated buses were outlawed, to coalesce a band of followers, or foot soldiers, to protest with him. The conflict-and every good story needs conflict-between the two men eventually led to the children's crusade in which Bull called out the police department's attack dogs and ordered the fire department to turn the hoses on the young protesters. This heaped worldwide embarrassment on Birmingham, and on the United States, and it forced the Kennedy administration to call for an end to the second-class treatment of this country's black citizens. Without the conflict in Birmingham-Fred's peaceful protests and Bull's violent responses to them-it likely would have taken even longer for the country to look at the problem of race relations and equality.
 
4. Were there any traits that Shuttlesworth and Connor shared?

A. Both Shuttlesworth and Connor came from humble, working-class backgrounds. Both were family men who wanted to pass on their vision of the South to their children. Both men justified their disparate visions of that South in religious terms. While Fred thought that God had spared his life on numerous occasions to lead the fight for equality in Birmingham, Bull was equally convinced that God intended for the races to remain apart with whites superior to blacks, as was the tradition in the Old South. What struck me most about the men was that each was relentless and dogged in his stubborn belief that he was on the right side of justice.
 
5. Did you have any trouble researching Shuttlesworth and Connor?

A. There was an excellent adult biography by Andrew Manis about Shuttlesworth called A Fire You Can't Put Out. Additionally, Shuttlesworth participated in multiple oral history projects and was interviewed extensively. He donated his papers and photographs to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI) where I did much of my research. Perhaps the frosting on the cake was talking with him and his second wife to get a sense of how they felt about the events of the 1950s and 1960s. Connor, on the other hand, was almost the missing man at the table. Although he donated his papers to the Birmingham Public Library's archives, they deal mostly with the day-to-day operations of the city and his various political campaigns. They do not address his personal side. Very little about his personal life exists, so I had to rely on newspaper interviews that he gave throughout his career. I'm told his family-his grandsons-still live in Alabama but that they're not inclined to cooperate with researchers and really don't want to be found, so this left me at the mercy of his public persona.

6. What is your research process? That is, how do you go about finding information about a topic and then the images that will support the text?

A. I like to read as much about a topic as possible before beginning my own research. This usually provides me with an overview of the history and attitudes of the time. It gives me a sense of what already has been written about the topic and sets my mind to speculating how my approach might differ to satisfy my audience. What is different about my process from that of many writers is that I like to visit the locale of a topic. I think that by doing so it helps me bring authenticity to my manuscript. For Birmingham Sunday and Black and White, this meant spending considerable time in Birmingham, Alabama. When I wrote a much earlier book, A Migrant Family, it meant spending time in a migrant encampment. I also make use of any contacts I might already have in a locale. For example, my association with the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) and its Alabama/Georgia/Florida chapter, Southern Breeze, pointed me to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. I would have eventually found my way there, but it was so much quicker to have trusted contacts recommend it as a source. I set up an appointment and spent a week-the first of many week-long visits-at the institute going through its archives. Contacts at the institute recommended a special program at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that coincidentally was planned during my initial visit. I attended and was graciously given a private tour of the small memorial in the church's basement. The same BCRI contact suggested that to fill in gaps in its collection I should visit the Department of Archives and Manuscripts at the Birmingham Public Library. So you can see that "the process" is one of building relationships and connecting the dots. A lot depends on luck, too.
 
For images, I make note of those that appeal to me as I do my research. I photocopy them or print them out, making sure to note each source. Sometimes these are from other books or magazines, but often they're from difficult-to-read archived newspapers. Typically, I don't begin the actual collection of images, though, until my manuscript is complete. In part, this is because I can get lost and spend hours I don't have doing photo research because I find historic images fascinating. But also it's because I don't know which, if any, of the images that caught my eye during the collection of information will actually work with the manuscript that I've written. I'm always on the lookout for the image that has had little or no circulation, so sometimes I contact family members (especially in the case of a biography) or local historical societies to see if they're able and willing to work with me. For Black and White, Reverend Shuttlesworth's sister, Mrs. Betty Shuttlesworty Williams, invited me to comb through family photos that literally had been thrown helter-skelter into an old box. No attention or care had been given to their preservation, so many were not useful to me, but I pulled those that I thought might play a role in the book. Even though many of these images were not used, Mrs. Williams helped to identify photos that I hoped to use. For example, one image that I'd been told was Reverend Shuttlesworth as an infant and planned to use turned out to be his brother Eugene. Keeping up with the relationships I'd established during the research phase, I was able to make a separate trip to Birmingham specifically for photo acquisition from BCRI, where Reverend Shuttlesworth had donated his private papers and photos, and the public library, which I knew had a collection of Connor images. Contacts, such as those at BCRI or the public library archives, are also the ones who can either be a writer's expert or point one to an authority on the topic. I have even been known to place ads in the classifieds or on Craig's List in my quest for images. Only when I've exhausted all other avenues do I turn to the stock photo agencies. In the end, I hope to have a collection of photos that will give the book's designer something to work with, because my goal is to have a book that is as eye-catching as it is informative.
 
7. What caught you by surprise in your research?

A. I was a youngster during the 1950s and 1960s, the early days of the civil rights struggle, and although my parents, both Birmingham natives, spoke about the horrendous conditions there regarding race, I was not prepared for the level of violence against blacks who did not accept their position in southern society. It's one thing to read about a mob attacking a person, but quite another to read in detail what constituted the attack. To find that the Ku Klux Klan would dynamite homes of black residents or beat blacks with baseball bats and pipes or firebomb a bus in an attempt to burn blacks and their white supporters alive is the very essence of evil. And yet, many of these same KKK members were church-going folk. This dichotomy just doesn't make sense.
 
8. You've become somewhat of an authority on the civil rights movement. What is it that you, a white man, find so appealing about it?

A. I've been asked this question many times and some have even suggested that I should leave black history to blacks and focus on my own history, and my response has been, "This is my history, too." I want to better understand what the struggle for civil rights was all about, and there is no better way to do that than by researching and writing about it. Furthermore, as a former teacher who visits schools across the country, I've been amazed by how little is taught about the struggle. It is almost as if the entire civil rights movement can be summarized in schools by the mention of two names: Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks. Children, and even adult groups that I speak to, don't seem to understand that the movement relied largely on unknown foot soldiers who were doing the real work of planning and protest, who were on the front lines of agitation and being attacked and getting arrested time and again.
 
9. What do you think is different and the same between our present era and the civil rights era?

A. As a country, we've made a lot of progress in race relations. We are, at least in law if not in fact, an integrated society. Schools are integrated. People of any color can enter and be served at a restaurant. We no longer have hotels catering either to whites or to blacks. We have an African American president. And yet, I'm also aware that most whites still live largely in white enclaves. The city of Birmingham, for example, is more segregated today than it was during the 1960s because of white flight to the suburbs. Blacks still tend to congregate together. And when I read that the KKK enjoyed a spike in membership following the election of President Obama, it tells me that we as a country still have miles to go before our attitudes catch up with the legislation.
 
10. Can you tell me a little about your writing process, especially in the context of this book? You write fiction as well as nonfiction. Is one genre easier than the other?

A. Let me respond to the last question first. Is one genre easier than the other? No, they're both equally difficult. With fiction, you have to create the characters and the circumstance and then tell the story. With nonfiction, although history gives you the characters and the circumstance, the writer still has to find the story and tell it in a way that is as engaging as fiction.

As for my process, I like to do a lot of research before sitting down to write. I also like to photocopy rather than take notes, because I like to mark up and highlight those parts that I think will be useful to me. Librarians would quake at what some of my resources look like when I'm finished with them. Once I have my door into the story-in other words, once I have figured out where and how I'm going to begin-then I like to break things down into smaller elements and write each of those before I combine them into a larger text. It's painstaking and slow; some days I feel lucky to advance the story by a sentence or a paragraph, but I have to remind myself time and again that all of the pieces will come together-about forty drafts later. With Black and White, the logical "door" was the 1956 bombing of Shuttlesworth's church. Then I needed to backtrack with some biographical information so readers would know the subject, that is, where Fred was born, what his early life was like, and so on. The finished product in no way resembles what my editor and I discussed when I pitched the idea to her. Originally, I saw it as a forty-eight page biography of Shuttlesworth, and you can see where the reality of it took me. This is why I prefer to pitch an idea rather than outline. An outline tends to force a writer to stay within the lines, as it were, but pitching an idea allows one to experiment with form and structure as one's research takes one deeper into the story.
 
11. What do you hope readers will take away from this book? Why is it important for people to know history?

A. It is important for us to study history because it allows us to understand people and society of an earlier time-or where we came from. It helps us to understand how and why we got to where we are, and it hints at where we might be headed. I don't delude myself into thinking that knowledge of history will help us avoid the mistakes of the past. People and societies are too ego-driven for that to be a valid statement. But I do believe that an understanding of the past helps to explain the present and points to the future. The primary reason we should study history, however, is because it's fascinating. What I hope readers will take away from this book is the reality that many people-a lot of them barely known-played important roles in furthering the cause of equality and civil rights. I hope they will understand that the civil rights movement was greater than one or two luminaries.