Iowa native writes book on pivotal 1963 civil rights campaign in Birmingham, Alabama

Paul Kix knew the picture well. Time after time, he came across the iconic photograph of Walter Gadsen, a 15-year-old Black teen and a civil rights protester, being bitten by a police dog in 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, — "the most segregated city in America" at the time.

But the image became more personal for the Iowa-born journalist who later married a Black woman and together raised three children. And in the wake of George Floyd's murder, the couple knew America would see their only daughter and identical twin boys "as Black," wrote Kix, who is white, in the prologue of his latest book, "You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America."

"This was the reason I returned day after day to the photo from Birmingham in 1963," wrote Kix, who will be at the Des Moines Public Library’s 2023 AViD series event at 7 p.m. Tuesday. "The Black family was my family. The Black experience was intertwined with my own.

"Even though I'm not Black, my life was bound forever, thankfully with Black lives. It was my job to understand my children's heritage as a way to understand what might lie in store for their future."

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Kix, a 2003 Iowa State University alum, also will be at Dog-Eared Books, 203 Main St. in Ames, Wednesday for the bookstore's Cocktails and Convos event. Tickets are $30 and sold online through the bookstore's website.

In the book, Kix recounts the story of the 1963 Birmingham Campaign, which he believes is the "story of America" — it's the one that "makes our lives possible today," he said in an interview with the Register.

The 10-week campaign — which launched library and lunch counter sit-ins, marches and a boycott of downtown merchants — was led by prominent figures including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and the Rev. James Bevel. It also introduced the use of young children in demonstrations.

Kix, whose work has been featured in ESPN Magazine and GQ, said he began writing his most recent book in 2020 in the midst of a layoff and as his family grappled with the civil unrest after Floyd's murder. The experience, he said, was unlike anything he had gone through while writing his first book, "The Saboteur: The Aristocrat Who Became France's Most Daring Anti-Nazi Commando," the story of Robert de La Rochefoucauld, an aristocrat who became a fighter for the French Resistance.

With "The Saboteur," Kix explained he was "chasing a ghost."

"If you had a paper trail and you were caught, not only were you tortured and killed but very often before you were tortured and killed, your family members were brought before the Germans and then were tortured and killed in front of you," he said of Rochefoucauld's plight. "There were a lot of reasons for Robert not to leave any paper trail during the war, which meant decades later I had to spend four years researching that book across five different countries just to assemble the facts."

But with the Birmingham Campaign, he found himself facing a mountain of information, sifting through academic and oral histories, memoirs and audio interviews.

That's when he got excited.

"I could do something beyond just placing people in a scene," he said. "I realized pretty quickly in the course of this research I could place people inside the protagonist's head. ... Because I'm like, 'Now you're going to see what they see. You're going to feel and think the way they thought.'"

F. Amanda Tugade covers social justice issues for the Des Moines Register. Email her at ftugade@dmreg.com or follow her on Twitter @writefelissa.