On Good Friday, April 12, 1963, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and others were arrested and jailed for peacefully marching in Birmingham, Alabama. That same day, eight prominent white Alabama Christian clergymen published “A Call for Unity,” an open letter that took issue with civil rights demonstrations led by “outsiders.”
It was that call for “unity” that King specifically responded to in his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” written on newspapers and scraps of paper, with its famous line, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
In his letter, King called out “the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice.” And he addressed the writers of the letter and their brethren: “I felt that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been cautious rather than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.”
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
John Archibald was one week old that Good Friday. Today he is a columnist for The Birmingham News and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2018. “Shaking the Gates of Hell,” his debut book, is his retrospective and reckoning with his own history, and Birmingham’s, but mainly with his father, Robert Archibald. A white Methodist minister in Birmingham at that time, Robert Archibald was a good and strong man (the author compares him to Atticus Finch) who nevertheless played it safe and rarely addressed the greatest moral issue of his time, except in the most oblique terms.
The events of April 1963 came shortly after George Wallace was inaugurated governor, vowing “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” and shortly before the Sunday when a bomb exploded in a Black Birmingham church, killing four little girls.
A mashup of memoir and social history, “Shaking the Gates of Hell” begins with Archibald finding a file cabinet full of his father’s old sermons, typed and dated, which led to an uncomfortable realization. In the midst of this struggle for the soul of the nation, Robert Archibald would preach reassuring sermons every Sunday about the importance of family and the Christian home, about sitting at the kitchen table receiving wisdom from his own father. He preached the same parables year after year without ever drawing any parallels to what was going on outside. When finally, in the late ’60s, he started mentioning Black calls for justice, he referred to it as “the problem of race,” a common construct (along with “the Negro problem”) that the moderate white power structure used at the time.
“I know it is harsh to judge a man in another place, another age,” the author writes. But he cannot avoid lamenting his father’s “sin of obliviousness, of self-absorption and privilege.”
The book’s title comes from Methodism’s founder, John Wesley: “Give me 100 preachers who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God… such alone will shake the gates of hell.” But too many white ministers of that era, Archibald writes, could not find the words “to shake the status quo of segregation, to shake the gates of hell.”
Archibald tries hard to provide context to his judgments. He spoke with Bill Nicholas, an academic who wrote a book about Alabama Methodists and civil rights in that period. “Your dad was aware of how much he could lose if he did deliver sermons on this topic,” Nicholas told him. “The consequences could be terrible. If you spoke out on behalf of integration, you’d be looking for a new church the next Sunday.”
Growing up in the Jim Crow South, the author was steeped in the myth of the Lost Cause, including its anthem “Dixie:” “Look away, look away, look away, Dixieland.” He laments the times that he, himself, looked away, even as an adult, the times when people told a racist joke or used a racist term and he did not speak up because he did not want to make trouble. “Weakness. Denial. Betrayal,” he writes. “And the cock crows.”
Failure to address civil rights is not Archibald’s only issue with the Methodist church. Later in the book he pivots to take on its handling of LGBTQ issues, which has caused a deep, ongoing schism in the church. His older brother Murray came out long ago, and Archibald writes in passing he has a child who is LGBTQ; he draws a direct and unsparing line between what he sees as the church’s treatment of the Black community and the LGBTQ community.
After the United Methodist Church voted to maintain its bans on gay clergy and same-sex marriage in 2019, Archibald announced in his newspaper column that he was leaving the only church he had ever known.
“Shaking the Gates of Hell” is much more than score-settling or second-guessing. Archibald writes lovingly of the many traditions and rituals in his family; of his long, sustaining relationship with his wife Alecia, an Agnes Scott College grad; and of his father’s final act. Diminishing slowly over many years in a Job-worthy cascade of cancer, strokes, Parkinson’s and more, the elder Archibald took sweet comfort in the faith that motivated his life and gave it meaning. “Heaven’s my home,” he liked to say, “but I’m not homesick.”
NONFICTION
By John Archibald
Knopf, 320 pages, $28.
VIRTUAL EVENT
“Shaking the Gates of Hell.” Author John Archibald in conversation with Cynthia Tucker, former editorial page editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 16. Free, registration required. Presented by Atlanta History Center. www.atlantahistorycenter.com
