John Archibald - Shaking the Gates of Hell: A Search for Family and Truth in the Wake of the Civil Rights Revolution

The people in this town who speak the most freely are usually those we dislike most.

Rev. Robert L. Archibald Jr., March 2, 1968

I was born in the midst of revolution.

The son of a preacher, the grandson of preachers. The great-grandson of preachers, too. They were all Methodistsuntil you look beyond the Civil War. They preached on horseback and on foot andin my dads casein a little white Fiat Spider. They preached of right and wrong and grace and goodness and believed it, I think, to their bones. They preached of stewardshippay up in Methodist-speakand dutifully passed the collection plate for missions in faraway places and building funds at home. In the name of God and something they called sanctifying grace, they preached in the Old South and longed for a New South, but were silent, too silent, on the complicit and conspiratorial South I never came to see until I was fully grown.

I was born in Alabaster, Alabama, a little crossroads outside Birmingham with a Methodist church and a Baptist church in those days, a stop sign, and a set of railroad tracks.

I was born on April 5, 1963, in the willful ignorance of the white South. I never knew, until much later, that as my mother went into labor, the foot soldiers of revolution gathered across the county line, that at the moment of my birth, Birmingham readied for a battle that was long overdue. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had not yet put his Dream to words, but he had come to this town to change the world with another masterpiece.

Birminghamwhite Birminghamdidnt like Kings arrival. Not the merchants, who mourned the lost dollar, or the cops, who demanded obedience. Not the Klansmen, who longed for the way things used to be, or the preachers, who feared the noise and glare and shining incongruities, who wanted so badly to stuff the powder back in its keg that they never saw the explosion coming. Even as they lit its fuse.

I was born in the midst of revolution. And I didnt even know.

A week after my birth, eight clergy members, Christians and Jews, printed a letter in The Birmingham News asking for the demonstrations to stop in the name of law and order and common sense. Eight white Birmingham men of God stood for the status quo.

King read their words and understood exactly what they meant. It was the past coming for the present, a call to do nothing, again, to slow the roll of justice in the name of peace. It was cowardice masquerading as reason. Silence in the guise of God.

Martin Luther King Jr. read that letter and decided he would march in Birmingham, even as friends advised against it. He was too important, they said. Tensions were too high, Birmingham was too hot. They warned him he could be hurt, or killed, or kept in jail for months by Eugene Bull Connors police department. But he marched, and was arrested a few hours later. It was Good Fridaythe day Jesus was hung to die after being betrayed by silver and silence. It was April 12. I was seven days old.

King was charged with parading without a permit, a crime deemed serious enough for solitary confinement. They put him in one cell and his colleague Rev. Ralph David Abernathy in another. And there they stayed. For days.

Connor, an active Methodist, thought Birmingham could keep King silent. Connor wanted him silent. Because silence is safe, and law-abiding, and powerless. Silence doesnt march, or demonstrate, or demand justice, or force you to see yourself. Silence vanishes. Into the night, like those men in hoods in their 57 Chevys with whip antennas bent double.

But what came out of that cell spoke louder than King ever had, up to then. What came out changed the city and the world and screamed with a voice that would not be silenced.

Legend has it King began his Letter from a Birmingham Jailwhat many think of as the most powerful written document of the civil rights eraon the margins of newspaper scraps. It was the best recycling ever. He finished the rest in a legal pad somebody slipped him inside, and the pieces were assembled like a jigsaw puzzle by Kings friend Wyatt Tee Walker.

The words were loud, and strong, and righteous.

I never read them. Not in Birmingham schools in the 1970s or my dads churches or history classes at the University of Alabama in the 1980s. They were not assigned or recommended in classes I took. I never read them until I got my first newspaper job at The Birmingham News in 1986 and needed to know the story of the citys past.

The date of the letter was never lost on me. It was April 16, 1963. It was written eleven days after my birth, twenty-three miles from the hospital where I was born.

I came to love that letter, for it was bold and spoke in phrases I could pretend to claim, in the way a white person of privilege might foolishly want to do:

I am in Birmingham because injustice is here.

Yeah.

I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Can I get an amen?

We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

We are. It does.

I wanted it to be mine. I tried to claim it. It was my town, the time of my life. But it would take me a long time to find my place in it. And it would not be the way I thought. Because the point of the letter did not emanate from the lyrical phrases that would become memes for justice. The point of the letter was, in many ways, the rebuke.