John Archibald | Journalist & Author

Okay.

We'll continue with an episode of Short takes from season one.

This is the second episode of that season one I did with John Archibald in 2021.

Note that the dates and references may be four years old or so.

If you don't know John, he's been a journalist in the south for over 35 years now.

You can catch his writings on AL.com.

he has a fantastic newsletter as well, which I highly recommend you subscribe to.

He's a native to the state of Alabama.

He's a two time Pulitzer prize winning reporter and writer.

And at the time of this recording, he was a newly minted author of the outstanding nonfiction book Shaking the Gates of Hell.

A search for family and truth in the wake of the civil rights revolution.

The book is well worth your time and it's John's examination of how his father, an Alabama minister, dealt with the civil rights movement as it was happening.

Did he handle it with grace?

Did he handle it correctly?

Was he on the right side?

What did he have to say from the pulpit and beyond?

Plus, in the book, John discusses the first person point of view he has on the events of the civil rights movement and where those events take us today.

But in our interview with short text, which you're going to hear, John discusses his own life, the racism he's seen in our modern Alabama, all the hate mail he receives for telling the truth, and he receives a lot in Alabama.

When you point out things, sometimes people do not like it.

John also talks about what he hopes happens at his own funeral.

John Archibald's a deep, thoughtful and interesting guy.

So I hope you find this one as insightful as I did.

Here it is.

Foreign.

Hello.

Welcome back to the Alabama Take series, Short Takes.

I'm your host, Blaine Duncan.

If you're tuning in for the first time, Short Takes is a brief interview talk show with a favorite artist, writer, painter, professional.

What we do is we limit ourselves to only four questions and as you might know by now, that fourth question is always the same.

Joining me today, I am very honored.

It's Pulitzer prize winning author AL.com columnist and journalist, Mr. John Archibald.

Hey, John.

Hey, how are you today?

Appreciate you.

I'm doing very well.

So how's it going up in Boston today?

Oh, it's, it's nice.

It's actually creeping up into the 50s today, which is like what, 90 at home?

So.

I imagine that the snow is.

You might be getting tired of that if you've seen a lot of it.

Yeah, it's gone now finally.

But you know, one of the things I wanted to do was experience a real winter in my life.

And I finally got that.

That is a goal for me.

At some point, maybe I can do experience one.

I don't know if I can handle it for as long as you have, but that would be nice.

In case anyone's wondering.

Beyondal.com John has recently released a memoir titled Shaking the Gates of A Search for and Truth in the Wake of the Civil Rights Revolution.

It's about growing up in Alabama in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

Your book is largely about reckoning with the danger of silence, I would say, particularly the evils of racism or bias.

It had to have taken a lot of self awareness and reflection to produce, I'd bet.

Well, I hope so.

I hope so.

I mean, you know, it was very difficult for me to find the right words, you know, to find the right tone in between.

You know, part of it is holding my dad accountable.

And my dad was a good man, so I wanted to show the full picture of him as well.

So it's about.

But it is about.

You've got it pegged.

It's about silence and the danger it causes.

I'm glad you mentioned tone.

That might have been the word I was searching for.

I talked to you just a second before we went on air.

The tone of it is pitch perfect.

I feel like a lot of people my age and older from Alabama, from Georgia, from Tennessee, you name it, would have very similar experiences.

And the tone is just moving when it needs to be.

It's reflective when it needs to be.

I really think it's a great work of nonfiction.

Thank you.

I have been really pleased with the fact that most people seem to get it.

And you can imagine, you know, you're writing a book that's largely about race as a white guy.

And let's face it, I finished this book in 2019 and turned it in.

So having missed all of 2020 being a white guy writing a book about race, you can imagine that I was.

I spent a lot of sleepless nights worrying that I got it just right.

And I don't know that I got it just right, but I feel good about it.

They're my words, and I think I did the best I could to pick the right ones.

Definitely your words.

Definitely your life, too.

It's all in there.

Before we get into our four questions, which are a little bit more open and philosophical, I still want to talk just a little about this work.

What do you see now in our time period that you saw or thought about when you were a boy growing up in those camps and with your dad in the ministry.

Well, you know, all of that, you know, shaped me into who I am.

I think, you know, those kinds of things are really a lot of shared experiences from people in the south.

And, you know, whether it's church or whether it's school or whether it's, you know, camps or outdoors and fishing and those sorts of things.

But, you know, the thing that bothers me if you ask me, and that may not be what you asked me, but, you know, I was born in 63, so all of which was such a significant year in the.

In the.

In the civil rights movement, you know, outside Birmingham, Alabama.

And for my whole life, I've been unable, and even while studying that period, you know, unable to really kind of put myself back in it and say, you know, how.

You know, to look at pictures of the mobs and the white mobs and, you know, the.

See the beatings and the burnings and the bombings and all that.

How did.

How does this happen?

Because all my life, you just didn't hear that people, you know, had a sense of shame, perhaps, about racism or those feelings, and so they didn't talk about them.

But in more recent years, and not just in Alabama, I'm talking about across the country and the world, you hear that language a lot more that sounds a lot like 1963 than it did 1973 or 83 or 93 or 2003.

So.

Or even 2013.

So in some ways, you know, it feels like you can better understand that climate now than you could for most of my life.

Which means it's important.

Very.

Yes.

To not be silent about it.

Yes.

I agree.

I won't give away anything because I think people will enjoy the book.

But there are two instances in the book that are probably a little bit more personal that I found just moving.

There's the scene with your father anticipating Christmas and doing the list, and there's a scene where you bring in what seems to be a dog that needs a home.

And those two scenes in the book just.

I still think about.

I've read them a while ago, a week or so ago, and I'm still pondering them.

And I think they work so well in the context of everything else.

Anyone who picks it up and sees the subtitle will know what the context is.

But those things, those.

Those personal editions are just touching.

They were touching, and they were great.

And that takes some strength, I think, to open up like that.

Well, thank you.

For those who want to know, we still have Barney the dog who arrived on that morning of my dad's funeral.

And he's a lot of trouble, but he's a good dog.

Good for Barney.

Glad he found you.

Yeah, I'm glad he found us, too.

Well, let's get into the four questions and we'll see if we can have some fun with them or get some in depth thoughts going.

So the first one, what's a harsh truth that you have a tendency to ignore in your own life?

You know, I want to say.

I want to say that it has to do with seeing good people.

Honestly, that's a strange thing.

It's not harsh in the sense that.

But I have a tendency, I think, to occasionally be too cynical about people, and particularly politicians, in which I have difficult time saying, hey, you did a good job.

And because, you know, I mean, sadly, because I write about politics in Alabama, usually when I've done that in the past, it has come back to bite me.

So it kind of poisons me.

But I think that's bad because I think that part of, you know, we're talking about the importance of silence.

It's not just about saying bad things, it's about saying good things when people deserve it.

But also, also it just struck me on a more, on a more personal.

I mean, you know, something that's more difficult for me is I think I've been too.

I think I was ambivalent too long about the death penalty because I had to cover, what, six executions and over the course of time and witnessed several of those.

And I always thought.

And that always, of course, came on the heels of talking to both sides of the issue.

And I did all of that as a straight news reporter.

And I tried very hard to be down the middle on those things.

So I never really allowed myself to think or understand about it.

But in recent years, as we've come to understand, just how many people are on death row without adequate counsel or without a lot of evidence against them, and we continue to see people who were improperly convicted run through with bad evidence.

I think that I've begun to feel like I haven't been vocal enough about it because I think the process is skewed.

And I think that people, particularly in a state that proclaims to love life, it's awfully hypocritical for us to rush through that process the way we tend to do.

Virginia banned the death penalty recently, I guess the first southern state to do so.

So there's hope.

You know, there needs to be more conversation about it.

At the very least, I thoroughly agree with that.

There are times when I not sure where my straddling lands.

So that's how I felt about it as well.

Yeah.

Interesting.

I'm an avid follower.

Follower of you on Twitter.

And I know every now and again both you and the guys like Kyle will share that you get what I would call hate email.

What's something you wish you knew?

What's something you wish people knew more deeply about your work?

Maybe especially these people who send the hate mail or not.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think, first of all, I don't necessarily think that people who send the worst of it want to know anything about, nor do I think they really read.

But I think I would really like, you know, I would really like them to know the broad history of me, I guess, in the sense that, you know, Alabama before 2010 was dominated by Democratic politics, which people tend to forget, which is a relatively recent time.

And I've been doing this for 35 years.

And I would hope they know that any of the.

I mean, obviously I write an opinion column now and most people who read me know exactly how I feel on the issues.

But.

And which would put me to the left of most people in Alabama, probably.

But it is not partisan in any way.

And I would.

I would like to.

For them to remember.

To go back and remember or look to see how the Democratic politicians felt about me before 2010, which was pretty much exactly like the Republican politicians think of me right now in the sense that there was a lot of calling out of corruption and mismanagement and those things.

And it's not the.

The red or the blue or the letter before the name that I care about.

It's not the partisanship that I care about.

It's simply that I feel like I have an obligation to say what I think is right and what, you know, my reporting indicates is right.

And so before they, you know, it's very difficult in this day and age because we all have a tendency to judge people on the snap thing or one phrase or whether they're wearing a mask or not, or million different things.

True.

And so it's easy to be painted with a broad brush.

And that's.

I just would like people to remember that it has.

It has that.

That my sword has sliced in both directions when I thought it necessary.

Yeah.

Good.

I'm always amazed at.

I assume some of these people even follow you online, and yet they take every opportunity to be angry about.

And I'm thinking, do you not follow him?

Is this such is the nature of Twitter, which is both a wonderful tool and a.

An emotional disaster.

It is.

So.

So having to.

Having probably been to your share of funerals, as the son and grandson of a preacher, I bet you may have thought about this question.

What do you hope people will say about you if it's your funeral or it's your retirement?

What do you hope they look back and say, well, I don't.

I have thought about this funeral thing maybe more than is necessary, if only because I'm trying to put together a good Spotify playlist for.

Seriously, because I want my funeral to be a party.

Yes.

In which, you know, I have.

My most fundamental belief is that we are the sum of our stories.

Right.

I mean, what we do makes us who we are.

And some of that's good, and some of that's not good, but it all comes together to make us who we are, whether we regret it or not.

So I would love at my funeral, which I don't want to call a funeral, I want to call it a. I want to call it a party.

And I want people to listen to music I like and I want them to tell stories about me, whether they're embarrassing or not.

And just so people can know what they remembered and if.

And I think that probably would do a.

And I want them to drink tequila too, while they're doing it, because they're not going to tell good stories unless they do.

So they're gonna have to do tequila shots and they're gonna have to tell stories about something they remember.

And then I'll be happy.

I'll be dead, but I'll be happy.

Well, that'll.

We.

That'll be years and years from now.

We hope, but.

We hope.

But that's a great one because I've always hoped that that's how people will reflect on me in more of a sense of joy or a place of joy, maybe even not even in the funeral home or church.

I do not want to go into funeral.

Also, I gotta tell you, my whole goal in life really is to beat the death industrial complex somehow, which is, you know, because, I mean, no funeral home.

If I can get a.

If I can get.

I mean, I know they'll still charge me for the incineration process, as I like to call it, but, you know, any way I can find to thwart that, I would.

I would like to do that just because.

I don't know why.

It just bugs me.

I'm happy you said that.

I'm on board with that.

And I may borrow that phrase from you the death industrial.

If I could just build a bonfire outside, you know, that would be great, but unfortunately that is not allowed.

Right, well, maybe the bonfire for the sharing of the stories then.

Yeah, there you go.

That's what we need.

Yeah.

Well, let's go to our fourth and final question.

Maybe viewers know what this is.

It's what's done up real good for you.

All right.

I'm pretty stereotypical on this.

I would say Bama football.

Gotta be there.

To Kill a Mockingbird.

Gotta be there.

The Princess Bride.

Gotta be there.

Nice.

Because, you know, I realized.

You know, I realized one time my editor pointed out this was several years ago, that he went back and found columns from three Augusts in a row.

I don't know why August, but just August, three Augusts in a row, where I had written columns that were essentially based on the Princess Bride, so.

Or phrases from.

Different phrases from the Princess Bride, which always apply to Alabama politic.

You keep using that word.

I don't think, you know, it means what you think it means.

Inconceivable, etc.

Etc.

So, I mean, the Princess Bride, I could go on and on and on.

There's.

There's a book I give away all the time.

It's called Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman, who is a physicist and a writing instructor at mit, which is strange combination when you think about it, but it's a book about.

It just imagines what Einstein might dream about.

And it's not a book.

If you had told me that, I would never have read it.

But it's just such a beautiful book and it's so easy to read and it's so poetic that it just drew me in and made me love it.

And so I guess if I had to answer in, if I had to pick just one of those answers and I could take album football out and still just go every Saturday when the DNA kicked in.

Sure.

I'd go with Einstein's Dreams.

Right.

Okay.

I've never heard of that book.

Good recommendation.

Yeah, you should read it.

I'll send you one.

Hey, I'll take it.

And I'll read it too.

And I could.

I can quote those opening lines to To Kill a Mockingbird.

And that last line, I better not quote it.

It'll bring me to tears.

I love that book.

Atticus was still there and he'd be there all night.

Right?

It's beautiful.

And it fits so well with your work, which hones in on your dad, who seemed like a beautiful person too.

I think you've done him a great honor.

Thank you for taking your time to talk to me.

I know you have a busy schedule.

Quickly though, would you like to point somewhere where you'd like for our audience to find your book?

Specifically, you know I love the local bookstores so you know Alabama Booksmith or thank you Books or little professor in Birmingham are great but you can get it anywhere.

You can.

Yes, you sure can folks.

His writing is top notch online.

Al.com the Pulitzer suggests as much.

Go seek out John Archibald but maybe most importantly find his book shaking the Gates of Hell about his and his family's growth during the civil rights movement, the tumultuous time during Birmingham in the 60s, 70s, even into the 80s.

The book is very layered.

Be careful.

It will cause you your own self reflection so so be aware of that but hopefully in a good way.

As for our viewers, we'll see you again soon.

Thanks again to John.

Take care.