Diane McWhorter
Author and journalist Diane McWhorter (1952- ) is best known for her 2001 book Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, which won a Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the Columbia Journalism School’s J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize in 2002. Reviewers considered Carry Me Home a distinguished work of investigative journalism, history, and memoir that interweaves McWhorter’s personal family narrative with the civil rights history she witnessed growing up in Birmingham, Jefferson County, in the 1950s and 1960s.
McWhorter was born on November 1, 1952, in Tupelo, Mississippi, to Martin and Elizabeth Gore McWhorter. The couple would later divorce, and Elizabeth would remarry. When Diane was five years old, her parents moved the family to Alabama, where her father was born. Martin’s father, Hobart Amory McWhorter Jr., was a prominent Birmingham attorney who worked for the Alabama Power Company and named his son for its president, Thomas W. Martin. Her father served in the U.S. Marine Corps and was an expert diver. Following his service in the early 1950s, he established the McWhorter Engineering Company, which manufactured high-pressure air compressors for the scuba industry in the family’s ancestral Cherokee County and later in Birmingham.
McWhorter and her two brothers lived a privileged childhood in Mountain Brook, a wealthy suburban community near Birmingham, the city Martin Luther King Jr. called “the most segregated city in America.” As a young girl, she attended the elite Brooke Hill School (later merged with Birmingham University School to form the Altamont School). Her parents also were members of the exclusive and segregated Mountain Brook Country Club (present-day Mountain Brook Club), of which Hobart Amory McWhorter was a charter member.
In segregated Birmingham, McWhorter frequently observed bigotry. In Carry Me Home, she recalls that, as a child, she had been comfortable in the knowledge that the civil rights movement was “bad” and that the adults, including her parents, were “rightfully” fighting against it. She remembers her father’s habit of slipping out at night to attend what he called “civil rights meetings,” where White community members strategized to halt civil rights.
After completing school in Birmingham, McWhorter studied literature at Wellesley College, graduating in 1974. Afterward, she worked as a writer for the Boston Pheonix, an alternative weekly newspaper. She would later work for Boston magazine, eventually becoming the publication’s managing editor. In 1976, McWhorter was reading an account of the Birmingham civil rights events in the Alabama volume of a bicentennial series on the 50 states when she came across the name of Sidney Smyer, her own decades-older cousin from Birmingham. For the first time, she learned that he had played a key role in the negotiations that ended the Birmingham Campaign, the months-long effort by civil rights activists to desegregate the city in 1963. She cites this as the moment that prompted her to revisit the history of the Birmingham civil rights era. In 1982, McWhorter signed a contract with Simon & Schuster to write Carry Me Home. Her process of investigation, which required extensive research into FBI and police files and archives, would take her 19 years to complete and would be her primary professional focus throughout those years. During this time, McWhorter married author Richard Dean Rosen in 1987; they would have two daughters.
Carry Me Home encompasses hundreds of written and in-person interviews with civil rights participants, conversations with Klansmen, and oral histories of politicians and the era’s leaders, such as John and Robert Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover, George Wallace, Eugene “Bull” Connor, Fred Shuttlesworth, and Martin Luther King Jr. The book’s dramatic account of the civil rights struggle in Birmingham reveals the veiled collusion among Birmingham’s wealthy establishment, politicians, police, and the Ku Klux Klan to disrupt civil rights initiatives. McWhorter traces this symbiosis back to the New Deal, when Klansmen were agents of Birmingham’s iron and coal industrialists fighting organized labor.
McWhorter’s next book, Dream of Freedom (2004), is a brief history of the civil rights movement from 1954 to 1968 aimed at young readers. She also continues to work as a journalist. She has reported on Alabama’s abortion laws for CNN and about the politics of space exploration for The New York Times. She is on the board of contributors for USA Today and has been a contributor to Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, and The Washington Post. Her narrative style connects personal observation of contemporary human rights issues to historical facts to convey an understanding of the ongoing struggle between power and justice in America.
McWhorter has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship, and a fellowship at the W.E.B. DuBois Research Institute at Harvard University. She is a recipient of the 2015 National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award and has also received an A. Verville Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum.
McWhorter’s current work-in-progress is a book about Wernher von Braun, the Nazi Germany rocketry expert whom the U.S. military eventually brought to Huntsville’s Redstone Arsenal. There, he pioneered U.S. rocket development, becoming the “father” of the U.S. Space Program that put Americans on the Moon.
Works by Diane McWhorter
Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (2001)
A Dream of Freedom: The Civil Rights Movement from 1954 to 1968 (2004)
