John Archibald on Living with the Domestic Terror of 1960s “Bombingham”
March 10, 2021
I spoke to God last night. With him I shared my dreams. A living sacrifice, I want to be wholly accepted, Lord, to thee. But instead, to my weary soul it seems weakness and failure follow me.
–Rev. Robert L. Archibald Jr., journal entry, March 25, 1963
Most people think Birmingham got its nickname, “Bombingham,” after four little girls were killed in an explosion on a September Sunday morning at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. But that’s not true. As many as forty bombs, some lit with fuses and others detonated with timers rigged from fishing bobbers in leaky buckets, exploded across the city between the end of World War II and the Sixteenth Street blast in 1963.
For John Archibald, it began with silence. What he describes as “white silence.”
The Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist for Alabama Media Group writes of the deafening silence from the pulpits of white churches in his 320-page biographical memoir, “Shaking the Gates of Hell: A Search for Family and Truth in the Wake of the Civil Rights Revolution.”
Available on March 9, Archibald’s book tells of “an all-American white boy, son of a long line of Methodist preachers, in the midst of the Civil Rights revolution and discovering the culpability of silence within the church,” according to promotional material.
During a recent interview from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the author is studying under a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University for the 2020–2021 academic year, Archibald said, “The story of me starts with white silence, which is why this book just