Read an Excerpt
1
The Letter
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 Methodists—until you look beyond the Civil War. They preached on horseback and on foot and—in my dad’s case—in 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 stewardship—“pay up” in Methodist-speak—and 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.
Birmingham—white Birmingham—didn’t like King’s 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 didn’t 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” Connor’s police department. But he marched, and was arrested a few hours later. It was Good Friday—the 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 doesn’t 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 Jail”—what many think of as the most powerful written document of the civil rights era—on 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 King’s 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 dad’s 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 city’s 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.
For retreat, in the name of peace.
For obedience, in the name of law.
For silence, in the voice of God.
The point of the letter was shame and disappointment, and a truth so deep and ingrained that some people look at it for a lifetime and never see it at all. The point of this letter was not a message to black people who lived the struggle and knew the barriers and blockades. It was a message to cautious and careful white people, like those eight clergy members—the Waitful Eight, some call them—to whom King addressed the letter. Like the members of my family, who thought they understood. It was to people just like mine, who tried to live like Jesus but turned the other cheek only to look away.
King, in his letter, was direct:
I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice. . . . Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
You can see it today, as then, when protesters demonstrate against police shootings or economic injustice or governmental neglect. The racist or the closet racist clicks his or her tongue and speaks of entitlement, and just how far we have come in the South and the nation. The well-heeled moderate calls for order, and peace, and caution until all the facts come in. I have done it myself. Shallow understanding from people of goodwill causes them to wait, and the silence persists.
It’s easy to recognize that in a state where it is expected, where George Wallace stood in a schoolhouse door to keep education for the privileged. It’s simple to spot in a town that is less explosive than it used to be but is in many ways as separate and segregated as it was when King was known as “Mike,” when he came to stay with friends and confidants in the Birmingham neighborhood known as Dynamite Hill, where whites tried to control real estate with bombs. Misunderstanding is easy, and accidental, if careless.
But silence? Silence is something else. Silence, I always thought, was guilt. Silence was see no evil, acknowledge no evil, pretend there is no evil. Pretend we are post-evil. Silence is sinister, in a state and a region and a world that has long coaxed us to look away.
So when I was old enough to seek understanding, to question the most dedicated and humble and courageous and honest man I ever knew, I read King’s letter again, for the fiftieth time, and wondered if my family owned—if I owned—that part of it I didn’t want.
I was half a century old by then. My father, a preacher in the Birmingham area in the 1960s and that man I most admired, was now dead. King was almost fifty years gone, and my grandfather, also a preacher in Birmingham in the 1960s, had died a year after King.
My dad and granddad were legends of love and joy in my family and their communities, men of goodwill who believed in their God and their church in deep and profound ways. My parents hammered into their children that all people—all people—were entitled to the love and respect and the justice we took for granted. Dad quietly insisted I remain in public school in Decatur, Alabama, in 1970, the first year of court-ordered integration. He quietly met with black preachers during those turbulent times, and quietly signed me up for a new, integrated Cub Scout pack at the black Methodist church where his friend the Reverend Watt Washington preached.
He—along with my mother—quietly made me all I am, for good or for ill.
Quietly.
I struggled, though, to remember his words. I recalled none from the pulpit about race and justice and the sins that suffocated the South. I recalled no public acknowledgment of marches, no words about King or the black ministers in Birmingham—the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth or King’s brother A. D. King, both of whom were bombed out of their houses for daring to claim that all men and women really were created equal in that American dream.
I believe Dad feared losing his congregation, that it was better to have subtle influence than outright rejection.
“Once you lose them, they’re gone,” he said once about another matter.
So the “racial issue,” as he called it, the “race question,” became a political matter, a secular query to be answered outside the sanctuary that was the church, if at all. In the back of my mind it haunted me. All that time I’d seen only the goodwill. I had never confronted what it meant. King cut deep:
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 more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.
Silent.
I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.
I come from a family of ministers, in a state burdened by a history of injustice, in a region guided by those with the biggest Bibles and the loudest pulpits, and it took the death of my parents to make me question who I was.
I’d always pretended there was symmetry between me and King. I stayed in Birmingham, I told myself on my most haughty days, because injustice was here. What arrogance. What foolishness.
I had read all the inspiring parts of King’s letter and committed many to memory. But I read right over the damning parts, those that charged my world like an indictment in the days after my birth. What if? What if, I had to ask, it charged my family, too?
They were people of goodwill, I was sure. What if that’s not enough?
I thought, when I finally asked myself the question, that it was too late to know, with certainty. My father was gone, and memories fade. Until I found the file cabinets he left behind, with hundreds of sermons—every sermon he gave and some he gave many times—dated and noted and tucked away, in my own basement.
I knew this man. I knew his heart, and it was large. Now I could know where he put his words, in the crucible of Birmingham, in the cradle of the civil rights movement, at a turning point in history.
If only I dared.
2
A Serious Man
Never say something is too big to budge until you have asked your father to help you.
—Rev. Robert L. Archibald Jr., October 29, 1967
Dad always was a responsible man, so when it snowed a solid foot in Huntsville, Alabama, when I was two, he did not tie my sled to the back of his car as he did for my siblings and the other neighborhood children. He did not allow me to ride up Monte Sano Mountain, sliding, careening behind his Rambler station wagon in a long whipping train of sleds, screaming, like all those other kids, and praying only for life.
Nope. Dad was always a responsible man. He left me there on the side of the road. In the snow.
I was two.
Mother—Mary—came to rescue me, plucking me out of a drift.
“Honey!” she said to my dad later, after he towed the other children back up the side of Huntsville’s steepest mountain and prepared to make another run.
“Oh, bless Patty, sweet!” he said. “I was coming right back.”
Dad was always a responsible man. During that cold winter in Decatur in the seventies, when the Tennessee River froze as solid as a big river in the South can freeze, he insisted on walking out on the ice with us, so if we fell in, he’d be there to drown at our sides. When I slipped and fell, knocking myself senseless, he packed snow on my head to stop the bleeding while the other children scooted around on the ice.
It was only a concussion.
“Honey!” my mother said later. “Why didn’t you bring him home?”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Mary,” Dad said. “He wasn’t going to die!”
Dad was of the opinion that children needed a little adventure in their lives—that’s why they healed so well. So he tied ropes in trees and took us on perilous hikes, on winding trails overlooking certain death.
“Do it. Just walk across.”
