Keith D. Miller, in his preface to Rene Billups Baker’s My Life with Charles Billups and Martin Luther King, explains that in writing the book, Baker was breaking the silence. She breaks the silence about what it was like growing up as the child of a Civil Rights activist. She sums up that experience in the book’s subtitle: Trauma and the Civil Rights Movement. She breaks the silence about her father, Charles Billups, who was a largely unacknowledged leader of the movement, appearing in photographs as the unidentified man with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., or with the better-known Fred Shuttlesworth. Histories of the Civil Rights movement are not silent about the marches that took place in her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, but she fills in gaps about the significance of those marches in the larger history of the movement.
Rene Billups was born with her fists clenched, ready to fight the world. She saw the damage done to her father’s body when he was tortured by white men who went unpunished for their crimes. When she saw a white police officer arresting her father in their home, she bit his leg. Her father’s murder left her angry and distrustful of white people in general. She spent decades unable or unwilling to speak about the Civil Rights movement except to her husband. This book is her speaking out. She watched on television in 2013 as Andrew Young, on the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Church, praised Charles Billups for his leadership of a march that Diane McWhorter has called the “spiritual climax” of the whole Birmingham campaign for civil rights. Miller was in the congregation listening to Young, and the next day began the collaboration that led to Baker’s book. In clear, simple language, the adult Rene Billups Baker steps back with us into her early life to let us experience with her the pride and the fear that were a part of growing up as the daughter of Charles Billups. The trip back in time is well worth taking and captures a turning point in the history of nonviolent protest that helped change America.
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