The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963 was Christopher Paul Curtis' first novel.[1] He originally planned for the Watson family to travel to Florida rather than Birmingham.[1] In an interview, Curtis stated that his son read him Dudley Randall's "The Ballad of Birmingham" while he was working on the book, and the poem inspired him to change the setting of his novel to focus on a pivotal moment of civil rights history instead.[2]
While the Watson family is fictional, characters and events in the novel are based on Curtis' childhood in Flint.[3] Like the narrator of the story, Curtis was also ten years old in 1963, and he remembers his parents’ involvement in civil rights demonstrations during that time.[2]
