Date: 28 Nov 2021
Location: Zoom
Following Thanksgiving week, the group met via zoom on Sunday, November 28, to discuss our book selection for November – John Archibald’s Shaking the Gates of Hell: A Search for Family and Truth in the Wake of the Civil Rights Revolution. Several of the group had also attended and enjoyed LearningQUEST’s public program where the author spoke and did some readings from his book.
The book provided a historical review and moral reckoning of events in Archibald’s lifetime beginning with the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church where 4 children died, an event that occurred in the year of his birth just a few miles from his birthplace.
In the 1980’s Archibald learned about the bombing, read Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” and began to question why his father did not more strongly push for civil rights in the Jim Crow South. But he also recognized that his father and other white ministers were “stuck between the Bible and a hot place.”
The book was generally liked but a few thought the first half was disappointing and did not measure up to Archibald’s usual writings, that it could have used more editing. They thought the second half was much better, more compelling, better written. At least one person was having difficulty reading about these very troubled times in our history.
— Joyce