2. FRED SHUTTLESWORTH
The boy who became the man known as Fred Shuttlesworth grew up under the rigid system of segregation, which used skin color to determine the value and honor accorded a human being. Segregation served as both a political and an economic way in which to preserve the heavy hierarchies of southern society. Most people fail to question the ugliness of an official policy; once something gains the status of law, the majority tends to comply.
As a high school student in Birmingham, Shuttlesworth complied. Like the vast majority of Alabamians living under segregation, he assumed that segregation was the only possibility, the only way things could be. After getting married in 1941, Shuttlesworth relocated to Mobile where he worked at Brookley air force base. In an interview with Bud and Ruth Schultz, Shuttlesworth described how the initial seed of activism was planted in his mind:
While there, I was encouraged to register to vote by a person in the NAACP who was very outspoken. A few of those people were tolerated. They were called "crazy niggers" or "big, uppity niggers". So long as there weren't too many of them, the system could roll on anyhow. But you had to appreciate those brave people.
Around 1954, the year when the US Supreme Court reversed the Dred Scott decision which legalized segregation, Shuttlesworth was elected Membership Chairman of the NAACP. He remembers the time as one of hope, in which the law of the land suddenly paved a path for equality. In an interview twenty years later, Shuttlesworth looked back on the times:
Well, you must remember that we were two societies. Blacks and whites couldn't play together, couldn't sit together, couldn't go down the street together in 1948 in Birmingham, Alabama. United States Senator, Glenn Taylor was arrested for sitting in a church- the same church with the black children were killed in 1963- with Negroes.
Bull Connor was the epitome of segregation and Bull Connor had a saying, "Blacks and whites are not going to segregate together." A misnomer, but he said it. And even in mass demonstrations he said, "Birmingham may become a dead city, it will never become an integrated city." And when the massive struggle began and somebody went to him and said, "Now, Mr. Connor, this is a law-abiding country…" Connor replied, "Damn the law, down here, I'm the law."
The year 1956 strengthened his growing resolve. In May 1956, Alabama outlawed the NAACP while Shuttlesworth was still serving in his position as Membership Chairman. Shocked by the popularity and effectiveness of the Montgomery bus boycott, Alabama officials ignored the fact that the NAACP did not start the protest. In their panic, officials thought that outlawing the NAACP would, in Shuttlesworth's words, "kill the drive for freedom". The appetite for equality in a country that called itself "the land of liberty" was not going away. But Shuttlesworth understood that the strategy of the white supremacists would not work:
You can outlaw a movement, but you cannot outlaw the determination in people's minds and hearts to be free. I don't think you can do it. Then, now, anytime. You can keep a man in prison, but... you can't imprison his mind, he has to do that. By accepting the walls, actual or imagined. Freedom is something that I think people will always aspire to. And when you tell people they can't have it, this was... in effect saying, you can't hope.
You can't kill hope in people's minds and therefore we were determined. So it was on this [basis] that the Alabama Christian Movement was organized. ...I was the NAACP Membership Chairman, and, I was holding, I remember a membership meeting when this Sheriff, Deputy Sheriff came in with a roll of paper that looked liked it roll out half the room down to the floor, and he had a pistol with a shiny belt looked like it was the longest belt I'd ever seen.
He said, you're outlawed, you can't do this, you can't do that. And, of course, I didn't accept it, I told him I doubt if you're going to make this stick. And he said, well, you're outlawed. I guess the thing that got me was that people started calling up see, from all over, people saying what can we do, what can we do? Can we send things to New York?
Well, we couldn't collect membership, we couldn't do anything. And the NAACP Board, they were outlawed; our attorney Shores said, well we really can't do anything, we're outlawed. I said, we're going to have to do something. He said, well, you'll be in contempt. I said, well, we have to be in contempt. He said, If you get in jail for contempt, you can't get out. I said, well then, somebody has to go to jail.
Meanwhile, people debated what they could do. A couple of days passed; the debates and strategies continued. Shuttlesworth recalls how a plan finally took shape:
I remember Friday morning, or Saturday morning, I believe it was (before June 5th because we called our first mass meeting on June 5th), I sat up in the bed 3 o'clock in the morning wide awake. That "what shall we do" was just drumming in my conscience. And it looked like to me God or something said to me, you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. I knew then instantaneously, it was God telling me I had to call a mass meeting and get people organized so, I decided that Saturday to call a mass meeting and ask the Negroes if they wanted to organize for freedom.
I knew we'd be in contempt and I expected to get arrested. This was frightening, it hadn't been done in Alabama nor the South - every radio program, TV program, every 15 minutes, Rev. F. L. Shuttlesworth, 3191 North 29th Avenue, telling the Klan where to put the bomb... This went on from Saturday until Tuesday might just say hear Pastor of the Church, 16th Street at that time, was a famous preacher and he was nervous too, so he called me up and told him the Lord told him to tell me to call that meeting off. I wasn't quite as nonviolent then as I am now.
I said to him, "Well, Doctor, when did the Lord start sending my messages to you?" Because I knew he was afraid. That was about uh, 9 o'clock in the evening. But 11:30 that night, I recall it, there was my picture on TV, radio, everything was blaring out Rev. F. L. Shuttlesworth, Negro Minister, 3191 North 29th Avenue, has called a mass meeting, and he called me back at the same time that was on, he said, "Well, I've been praying. The Lord told me to tell you he really wants you to call it off. And I said, "Well, Doctor, I want to be respectful, but you go back and tell the Lord that I think he told me to call it on. And the only reason I'm going to call it off is he'll have to come down himself in person and tell me to call it off. He'll have to bring the identifying marks, his pierced in his side, nail prints in his hands. And so the meeting went on.
At the end of the year, the Ku Klux Klan brought their policy of terrorism closer to the bone. Shuttlesworth explained:
I believe it was the night after Christmas, but on Christmas Night in '56 the Klan set about uh, 16 sticks of dynamite right at the head of my bed, the corner of the church, the corner of the house and I was in the bed at the point of the blast. And this dynamite went off about 9:15. It blew the wall between my head and the dynamite away, it blew the floor out from under my bed, space of I guess, 15 feet. The springs that I was lying on we never found them.
The roof came down, all that dust, the house was about 60 years old, dynamite dust and blast was, smoke, other things were there. This is a strange thing, I knew that the bomb was meant for me, I knew what it was, and instantaneously, at the same time I had a sense of presence that I wouldn't get hurt. I knew that. You can know something you never read. And, I might say to you, at that moment all fear was taken from me. I never feared anything since that time.
This personal encounter with the Klan's policy of bombing homes and churches did not have it's intended effect. In Birmingham, terrorism against blacks failed to scare them into submission. Shuttlesworth describes how surviving the bomb blast fueled his convictions:
I walked out from this instead of running away from the blast, running away from the Klan, I said to the Klansman police that came, he said, "Reverend, if I were you, I'd get out of town as fast I could." I said, "Officer, you are not me, you go back and tell your Klan brethren that if God could keep me through this, then I'm here for the duration." I think that's what gave people the feeling that I wouldn't run, I didn't run, and that God had to be there.
The NAACP board wanted Shuttlesworth to pause, pull back, and lay low as they dealt with the KKK bomb's implication for the movement strategy. But Shuttlesworth insisted on continuing with the plans for the Birmingham desegregated bus rides. "There's nothing to think out," he told them. "We said we're going to ride and we ride- we do what we say for a change." So they rode the buses and over 250 people got arrested.
And so Shuttlesworth traded the fripperies of a middle-class life for the mold and mausoleum of the American jail. It was to be a common station in the journey of many civil rights activists. His activism resulted in his May 1961 arrest for a Freedom Riders protest (along with reverends William Sloane Coffin, Ralph Abernathy, and Wyatt Tee Walker). Shuttlesworth’s mug shot from that arrest is seen above, thanks to The Smoking Gun.
Among his many accomplishments, Shuttlesworth helped organize the 1965 voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, which ended in the notorious bloody confrontation on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. The notoriety comes from the horror and tragedy of this event, which made it impossible to continue doubting whether institutionalized white power was, indeed, a "harmless" affair.
Civil Rights Movement veteran Charlie Cobb recalls Shuttlesworth's courage and determination:
Shuttlesworth was not some smooth city guy. He had been raised in Alabama's backwoods and had been convicted of running his family's whiskey still in 1941. He'd been a truck driver and cement worker before becoming a Baptist preacher.
Although Shuttlesworth's bravery was already legendary, my generation of activists' first meaningful contact with him happened during the 1961 Freedom Rides. He tracked the Klan and informed CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality) of its violent plans. After Klansmen in Birmingham beat Freedom Rider Jim Peck into unconsciousness, Shuttlesworth boldly walked into the bus station and carried him to a hospital. Two days later in Montgomery, as hundreds of Klansmen surrounded the church of King colleague Ralph Abernathy, where Freedom Riders and local supporters were gathered, Shuttlesworth conducted CORE Director Jim Farmer through the mob into the church.
During his lifetime Shuttlesworth survived two bombings, dozens of arrests, and a number of police beatings that left him hospitalized. He brought many law-abiding, middle class blacks into the movement through his establishment of the Alabama Christian Movement for Civil Rights.
His participation and leadership during the march from Selma to Montgomery helped lead to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Shuttlesworth’s participation in St. Augustine during their violent Civil Rights marches and Beach wade-ins helped lead to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Teaching the next generation
An extensive collection of Shuttlesworth's speeches and letters is housed at the Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham. It is a must-see for families and homeschoolers in Alabama. You can also make use of this printable I created for Max about Shuttlesworth. It includes a primary source analysis activity based on a telegram from Martin Luther King Jr. to Shuttlesworth.
Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth: Amazing Alabamians (PDF)
Other resources
Shuttlesworth archives (The King Center)
Shuttlesworth Humanitarian Award
"The world is my pulpit" (A video interview with Fred Shuttlesworth)
Interview circa 1985 with Fred Shuttlesworth (Eyes on the Prize)
Shuttlesworth as remembered by others (Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement)
Gov. Bentley's remarks at Shuttlesworth's homegoing ceremony (Office of the Governor)
"Rep. Lewis gives a fiery tribute at Shuttlesworth funeral" (The Raw Story)
Dan Warren and Fred Shuttlesworth obits (The Economist)
