COEUR d'ALENE - Pulitzer Prize-winning author Diane McWhorter said the connections between her work and Coeur d'Alene have led to an obsession with the Lake City.

McWhorter is the featured speaker at this year's Idaho Humanities Council Northern Idaho Distinguished Humanities Lecture and Dinner on Sept. 22. She will be discussing her book, "Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution."

"A lot of my work in Birmingham involved mine-workers unions, so all that history in the Coeur d'Alene area is key to understanding that," she said. "I'm so excited about coming, just so I can see the place."

Known as "The Year of Birmingham," 1963 was a turning point in America's long civil rights struggle. In her book, McWhorter uses police and FBI records, archival documents, interviews with Klansmen and black activists, and personal memories into a narrative of the personalities and events that brought about America's second emancipation.

Although McWhorter grew up in Birmingham, she told The Press she never thought she would spend 18 years of her life researching and writing a book about it.

"At the time I just wanted to get out of there," she said. "I thought I would never return, I knew I was destined to leave."

However, when she was 27, McWhorter said, she realized she didn't know much about what had happened during her childhood. What began as a journalistic endeavor to explore Birmingham's critical role in the civil rights movement ended with the author becoming engrossed in the history of her hometown.

"Three years into the project I knew less than I did when I started," she said. "I think that's a fairly common path that people take because everything is always more complicated than it appears."

McWhorter added that since so much had been written about Birmingham, she had to master the existing material in order to expand on it. That expansion, she said, led her to be mildly criticized over her portrayal of Martin Luther King Jr.

"I made the literary decision to look at King exactly as he would have been remembered, or not remembered, if Birmingham hadn't happened," McWhorter said. "Birmingham is what really affirmed his leadership and my portrayal of King is rather anti-heroic. It's not that he's bad; he just doesn't have his act together yet."

Instead of King, McWhorter chose Fred Shuttlesworth, a minister and activist in Birmingham who led the fight against segregation, as the book's protagonist.

"He's the one I am sort of following with that heroic arc," McWhorter said. "It's somewhat tragic too because he sort of gets pushed out of the limelight at his greatest moment of triumph."

It was in Birmingham, at the national convention of the Humanities Council, that McWhorter made a connection with members of the organization's Idaho branch. This spring, she traveled to Idaho Falls for a lecture.

"I wasn't sure how much this civil rights history would resonate with people in a place with so few African-Americans but it was so interesting to see how much sense it made to them," she said. "I think it will be even more so because Coeur d'Alene and Birmingham have a lot in common, at least industrially."

Prior to the dinner, McWhorter will meet with students from Coeur d'Alene High School. Teachers at the school will have their students read a selection of the book and come prepared with questions for the author.

For more information on the event, or to purchase a ticket, visit www.idahohumanities.org or call (888) 345-5346.