'Shining a light on secrets'

COEUR d'ALENE — Diane McWhorter said when she was once asked why she acts like a sorority girl, she responded that it's because she is one.

"I think perhaps what she really meant by that is 'Why is a Southern Belle like you interested in all those dark things that you write about,'" McWhorter said to a filled banquet hall at The Coeur d'Alene Resort. "I do seem to be drawn to places where terrible things have happened, but I imagine it's because I come from Alabama with a reporter's notebook on my knee."

McWhorter was the featured speaker at this year's Idaho Humanities Council Northern Idaho Distinguished Humanities Lecture and Dinner on Tuesday night. The event — sponsored by the Idaho Forest Group, University of Idaho Coeur d'Alene, Idaho Public Television and the Coeur d'Alene Press — has been held in North Idaho since 2004 and serves as a fundraiser for the Idaho Humanities Council.

According to its website, the IHC "seeks to deepen understanding of human experience by connecting people with ideas, by encouraging civility and good citizenship, and by initiating community conversations about ideas that enlighten us about the past and light our way toward wisdom and a meaningful future."

Mike Kennedy, who serves on IHC's board, told the gathered guests that the organization brings distinguished speakers to several cities in Idaho, not just because they are cultural events but because they bring attention to the work of the council itself.

"The Idaho Humanities Council, for more than 40 years, has sponsored initiatives and supported grants throughout Idaho for programs that promote greater awareness, appreciation and understanding of literature, history, comparative religions, cultural anthropology, and other humanities disciplines," Kennedy said.

Kennedy then introduced McWhorter, whose discussion centered around her Pulitzer Prize-winning book "Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution." In her book, McWhorter uses police and FBI records, archival documents, interviews with Klansmen and black activists, and personal memories to create a narrative of the personalities and events that brought about America's second emancipation.

Known as "The Year of Birmingham," 1963 was a turning point in America's long civil rights struggle. McWhorter was a fifth-grader in Birmingham at the time, and spoke to attendees about her perception of the history-making events that took place in her hometown.

"It wasn't as if segregation was this kind of quaint custom and otherwise people went along with their business," McWhorter said. "It was euphemistically, but accurately, called 'Our way of life' and it formed and deformed every aspect of human existence in the South. The cunning of totalitarianism is that people adapt to it, relinquishing more and more parts of their humanity whether they are being oppressed or doing the oppressing. Eventually it feels normal."

McWhorter spent 18 years of her life working on the book, telling the audience that by telling the stories of the time period she learned that everyone is affected by forces they don't understand. Those forces, she said, caused city fathers in Birmingham to make decisions in 1963 that they considered an act of class preservation, but instead stained the city forever.

"We changed, certainly," McWhorter said. "But did we learn?"

The author concluded her remarks by stating that, when she talks to young people, she says what causes them to suffer now could end up being their biggest asset later in life. Growing up in Birmingham, the wrong place at the wrong time, makes her the luckiest person in the world, she added.

"On the most personal level, that's what my book is about," McWhorter said. "Shining a light on secrets deprives them of their most toxic power, whether over an individual or a group of people. So that, my friends, is a highly, perhaps even proudly, inefficient way of explaining how a sorority girl grew up to be this moral scold standing before you today."