David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

busload of civil rights activists were on
their way to Birmingham, the local
police stood by while Klansmen forced
their bus to the side of the road and set it
afire. Black people who tried to move
into white neighborhoods had their
homes dynamited by the city’s local Ku
Klux Klansmen so often that
Birmingham’s other nickname was
Bombingham. “In Birmingham,” Diane
McWhorter writes in Carry Me Home,
“it was held a fact of criminal science
that the surest way to stop a crime wave
—burglaries, rapes, whatever—was to
go out and shoot a few suspects. (‘This
thing’s getting out of hand,’ a [police]
lieutenant might say. ‘You know what