Fred Shuttlesworth

Fred Shuttlesworth (born March 18, 1922, Mount Meigs, Alabama, U.S.—died October 5, 2011, Birmingham, Alabama) was an American minister and civil rights activist who established, with Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Ella Baker, and others, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and who worked to end segregation in the South. Shuttlesworth was the primary instigator and organizer of the Birmingham Campaign, a direct-action campaign for racial equality in Birmingham, Alabama.

Early life

Freddie Lee Robinson was the eldest child of Alberta Robinson, who later married William Shuttlesworth, a sharecropper, coal miner, and moonshiner. One of eight children, Fred Shuttlesworth grew up poor on his stepfather’s farm in rural Alabama. Following high school-graduation he was employed as a cement worker and drove a truck at Brookley Air Force Base in Mobile during World War I. He pursued theology classes at Cedar Grove Bible College at night and was ordained a minister in 1948. While studying at Selma University (B.A., 1951) and Alabama State College (now Alabama State University; B.S., 1952), Shuttlesworth began preaching at the First Baptist Church in Selma. In 19563 he left Selma to become the pastor of Birmingham’s Bethel Baptist Church.

Confrontational leader

In Birmingham, Shuttlesworth became increasingly involved with the civil rights movement, conducting his first civil rights action in 1955, when he petitioned the Birmingham City Council to integrate the police force. He worked with such organizations as the Civic League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) on efforts that included increasing voter registration among African Americans. In 1956, after an Alabama circuit court banned the NAACP, Shuttlesworth founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), which sought to put pressure on city officials to overturn Birmingham’s segregation laws. The following year, along with other prominent civil rights leaders, he helped establish the SCLC, and, with Coretta Scott King, led the organization’s first meeting after King and Abernathy were called to Montgomery.

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From 1957 through the end of 1962, 17 Birmingham Black churches and homes of civil rights activists were hit with explosives, earning the city the moniker “Bombingham.” Shuttlesworth, who King called “one of the nation’s most courageous freedom fighters,” led the city’s direct-action integration campaigns. For his efforts—which included challenging the city’s segregation of schools and buses and participating in sit-ins and the Freedom Rides of the early 1960s—Shuttlesworth experienced numerous physical attacks. On Christmas Day in 1956 his home was blown up by the Ku Klux Klan in response to Shuttlesworth’s pledge to mount a bus boycott in Birmingham similar to that waged in Montgomery in 1955. In September 1957 he was brutally attacked with bicycle chains and brass knuckles while taking his own children to integrate the all-white Phillips High School. Shuttlesworth’s unflagging and unflinching leadership and commitment to nonviolent protest, combined with Birmingham’s reputation as being representative of the “hard-core, recalcitrant, segregationist South,” made Birmingham the strategically perfect place to launch a new phase of the SCLC’s protest activities in 1963.

Birmingham Campaign

On April 3, 1963, the SCLC and the ACMHR, led by Shuttlesworth, launched “Project C,” (C for confrontation) a protracted campaign of civil disobedience against segregation in Birmingham. In a “Birmingham Manifesto,” made public on the same day, Shuttlesworth and ACMHR Secretary N.H. Smith articulated the reasoning for the campaign:

The Negro protest for equality and justice has been a voice crying in the wilderness.…We believe in the American Dream of democracy, in the Jeffersonian doctrine that “all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these being life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”…The absence of justice and progress in Birmingham demands that we make a moral witness to give our community a chance to survive. We demonstrate our faith that we believe that The Beloved Community can come to Birmingham.

Initially, there was little enthusiasm in the local community for the campaign. Only 15 volunteers took part in the sit-ins staged on April 3. Another sit-in, led by Shuttlesworth on April 6, attracted only a few dozen participants. Meanwhile, the city lived up to its reputation of upholding strict racial division by meeting protesters with increasingly hostile law enforcement tactics and filing a federal court order to halt the protests. On April 12 (Good Friday), King, Shuttlesworth, and Abernathy led a march of about 50 volunteers toward downtown Birmingham. The leaders and volunteers (including King, who wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” while in solitary confinement) were arrested and jailed by the city’s commissioner of public safety, Eugene (“Bull”) Connor.

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On April 20 Shuttlesworth declared to followers and the national press that a massive new phase of the campaign would begin on May 2. However, this announcement was merely a delaying tactic. In truth, the leaders had no clear plan or ideas—except one, but it was an idea they were reluctant to use. This was James Luther Bevel’s suggestion that the campaign recruit students. King initially rejected their proposal, saying that Birmingham’s jails were “no place for children.” Bevel’s reasoning prevailed, however, in no small part because of the desperate situation in which the movement found itself. It was decided that the campaign would welcome minors, although recruitment efforts were to focus on high schools. Over the objections of parents, teachers, and other members of the community, campaign volunteers passed out leaflets to teenage students ahead of May 2 and made further use of the recruitment of popular teens to convince their peers to not attend school and march instead.

The Children’s Crusade, as it was later dubbed, began on May 2, and more than 1,000 students participated. Most of them were teenagers, but some were as young as six years old. The police took at least 600 children into custody, and Connor commandeered school buses to transport all of them to Birmingham’s jails. Some of the children were held at juvenile detention facilities and even at a local fairgrounds. The following day hundreds more young people showed up to march. With the city’s jails now filled to capacity, Connor ordered his officers to disperse the young protesters instead of arresting them. The police proceeded to break up the demonstrators’ lines with nightsticks, dogs, and high-powered fire hoses. A blast from a fire hose knocked Shuttlesworth against a wall of a church. Connor later said to The New York Times, “I waited a week to see Shuttlesworth get hit by a hose. I’m sorry I missed it.…I wish they’d carried him away in a hearse.” The violence was captured by news photographers and television crews for dissemination worldwide, and the images of police committing acts of brutality against schoolchildren horrified Americans.

The campaign drew condemnation from many public figures who accused organizers of endangering children. But it had the intended effect of breaking through the country’s indifference to segregation. On May 4 Pres. John F. Kennedy dispatched Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall to Birmingham and urged the city’s white leaders to negotiate with the demonstrators. On May 10 white city officials and Black civil rights leaders agreed to a tentative deal that included the desegregation of lunch counters, fitting rooms, restrooms, and drinking fountains; the implementation of nondiscriminatory hiring policies; the release of those arrested during the protests; and a Senior Citizens Committee made up of Black and white residents.

The repercussions of the campaign extended beyond Birmingham. Concerned that the campaign might inspire Black citizens in other American cities and hoping to prevent further violent backlash from segregationist authorities, Kennedy made a televised address on June 11 to announce his support for federal civil rights legislation to ban racial discrimination in public accommodations, education, employment, and housing. In the address, he asked Congress to enact such legislation. Sustained pressure from the movement and the presidency (first Kennedy’s, then Lyndon B. Johnson’s) ultimately led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Beyond Birmingham

In 1961 Shuttlesworth moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he founded the Greater New Light Baptist Church in 1966 while continuing to lead in Birmingham and participate in civil rights actions across the country. He delivered an impromptu speech at the March on Washington, declaring, “If freedom belongs to anybody, it belongs to everybody, and until everybody has freedom, nobody is really free.” Shuttlesworth helped organize the historic march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965, and until his death in 2011, attended annual “Bloody Sunday” commemoration marches over the Edmund Pettus Bridge. In an effort to provide low-income housing, he established the Shuttlesworth Housing Foundation in Cincinnati in the 1980s. He received the Presidential Citizens Medal, the country’s second highest civilian award, from U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton in 2001. Five years later Shuttlesworth retired from the ministry.