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John Archibald on Living with the Domestic Terror of 1960s “Bombingham”
March 10, 2021
I spoke to God last night. With him I shared my dreams. A living sacrifice, I want to be wholly accepted, Lord, to thee. But instead, to my weary soul it seems weakness and failure follow me.
–Rev. Robert L. Archibald Jr., journal entry, March 25, 1963
Most people think Birmingham got its nickname, “Bombingham,” after four little girls were killed in an explosion on a September Sunday morning at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. But that’s not true. As many as forty bombs, some lit with fuses and others detonated with timers rigged from fishing bobbers in leaky buckets, exploded across the city between the end of World War II and the Sixteenth Street blast in 1963.
I’ll never forget my first organising training course in 2016. We walked through scenarios about arrests, communications, treating pepper spray, and supporting our comrades. And then the instructor, a young Black Chicagoan, slowed his speech, looked at all of us solemnly, and said, “Be prepared for anything. They will drag you. They will knock you unconscious. They will do whatever they can do to keep you from speaking out. They will literally kill you.”
At the time, during a critical period in the Movement for Black Lives, we were actively fighting against a system that had facilitated the killings of young Black Americans like Rekia Boyd and Quintonio LeGrier. As a collective, we were struggling to find justice for young Black people in Chicago who were facing the hyper-surveillance of the state, mass school closures, divestments in communities of colour and white supremacist violence.
Image: Unsplash
One of the most significant statements in the history of the Civil Rights struggle. It never gets old for me.
April 16, 1963
MY DEAR FELLOW CLERGYMEN:
While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statements in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.
The Craziest Things That Happened On Christmas Day Throughout History Fototeca Storica Nazionale./Getty Images
By Marina Manoukian/Dec. 19, 2020 9:06 pm EDT
Although some people associate December 25th with Christmas, there are so many different things that have happened on December 25th throughout history, some associated with Christmas and some having very little to do with it. With other events, it s unclear whether or not December 25th was deliberately chosen.
The first recorded celebration of Christmas occurred in the year 336 AD, but at that point it wasn t an official Roman state festival yet. At the time, Saturnalia was also celebrated around the same time, and as Christianity grew in popularity, the two celebrations were unified to make things easier. And within 2,000 years, almost every printed calendar started denoting December 25th as Christmas.