Shaking the Gates of Hell: A Search for Family and Truth in the Wake of the Civil Rights Revolution

In this moving and powerful book, Archibald writes of his complex search, and of the conspiracy of silence his father faced in the South, in the Methodist Church and in the greater Christian church. Those who spoke too loudly were punished, banished, or worse; his father was warned to guard his words on issues of race to protect his family, and he did. Archibald grew up in Alabama in the heart of the civil rights movement, he could recall few words about racial rights or wrongs from his father’s pulpit at a time the South seethed, and this began to haunt him. He writes of this difficult, at times uncomfortable, reckoning with his past in this unadorned, affecting book of growth and evolution.

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