I mean, I think any of my readers would tell you that. And God knows I’ve said the wrong things sometimes. And it’s also about understanding that we have all been silent some time about something important. But if you’ve got a pulpit and you don’t use it, what good is it? But it’s also about growth. I say it all the time in reference to this book. And that’s where I got really frustrated. And it took a long time for him to grow into his voice and get to a point where he was comfortable saying things, that he would say to us, from the power of his own pulpit. And so it took a while for me to understand the sort of conspiracy of silence that was ongoing in the white church at that time, which is exactly what Dr.
Those who remain silent in the face of oppression windows#
And all these places but not outside the stained glass windows of the churches in Birmingham, Alabama, or Decatur, Alabama, Huntsville, Alabama. And he would talk about issues of trouble in the world, in Asia and Africa and South America. Because on the vitally important weeks that we know, whether that’s the Children’s Crusade, or whether that’s the Selma to Montgomery March or the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, important pivotal moments in the Civil Rights history in that place we like to think of as the cradle of the civil rights movement, it was missing. And that and the issue of silence is what is what took me through it.Īrchibald: Oh, absolutely. When I found them it became about, well, it’s another line from from the letter from a Birmingham Jail, ‘where there’s great disappointment, there has to be great love.’ And I think that’s the through line, really, of the book, not just about him, but about the church sometimes and about about many things that I care deeply about that continue to disappoint me. But when I found all his sermons, I began to read through them, and they were dated and notated and all these things. Because he was saying the right stuff at home. So, when I began to really think about this quest, it’s because all my life I’ve wondered, kind of in the back of my head, what he was saying during the civil rights movement from the pulpit.
And I always saw him as the strongest man I’ve ever met in my life and most courageous, which is why, you know, I held him and still hold him on a pretty high platform. And my dad was one of the most principled men I’ve ever met in my life. John Archibald: Well, first of all, before I answer that question, you’ve got to know my dad.