— PASTOR FRED SHUTTLESWORTH —
Not Raised to Run
One of the most popular songs of the Christmas season of 1956 was a rendition of ‘I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day’ sung by Bing Crosby. It was played on record players in comfortable stuccoed living rooms across Middle America – the soundtrack to the chocolate-box Christmases of which the Janets and Johns of the world’s new superpower had long dreamed. Yet, while Bing’s beguiling baritone gave the song a jovial and festive air, the lyrics (in fact a poem written by master of American folk gloom, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, at the height of the American Civil War) painted a much darker picture than many of its listeners may have realised:
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play
And wild and sweet
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
…
And in despair I bowed my head;
‘There is no peace on earth,’ I said;
‘For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!’
The Christmas of 1956 was a long time after the American Civil War (indeed, the last surviving veteran of the conflict had died in the August of that year) and yet its scars still remained. Hate was still strong in the Deep South.
The Advent period had been busy for the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, Pastor of Bethel Church, a Baptist congregation in Birmingham, Alabama. Any cleric of any denomination will be only too happy to relate the litany of services and events that they have to attend at that time of year. Fred Shuttlesworth had not only the normal round of carol services, Bible studies and Christmas visits that the festive season brings to clergy; he spent every spare hour he had involved in the civil rights campaign, chairing the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, founded by Shuttlesworth in May that year when the government of the state closed down other anti-segregation organisations formed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
With a dual career as pastor and politician, it was no surprise that, on Christmas night 1956, Fred Shuttlesworth had gone to bed early. Not long after 9 p.m., the parsonage where Shuttlesworth and his family lived was ripped apart by an explosion as sixteen sticks of dynamite detonated the other side of the pastor’s bedroom wall. They had been planted there by the Ku Klux Klan, determined to kill Shuttlesworth and, in so doing, teach others a lesson: that the segregated system, whereby black people were denied their rights through both institutional racism and vigilante action, was not to be messed with. The whole neighbourhood heard the explosion and, in nightdresses and dressing gowns, burst out onto the street, expecting to find their pastor lying dead in the cold Christmas air. In fact, miraculously, Shuttlesworth had survived, having fallen through the collapsed floor of his bedroom into the basement, where he was found by police under a mound of rubble.
Shuttlesworth’s first instinct was to go and reassure his neighbours and congregants that there was no danger to them. He was a committed advocate of non-violent resistance to the system of segregation and was determined that the attack on him not be mobilised to stoke up tension or incite violence. As he went towards the assembled crowd, a police officer, himself a member of the Ku Klux Klan, came up to Shuttlesworth and, disguising a clear threat under the sheep’s clothing of friendly advice, warned the pastor that ‘if I were you I’d get out of town as quick as I could’. Shuttlesworth turned, looked the man squarely in the face and replied, ‘I wasn’t raised to run.’
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Fred Shuttlesworth wasn’t raised to run. He was raised on a small, subsistence farm near the unincorporated settlement of Mount Meigs, Alabama – a place famed only for the looming presence of a large juvenile correction facility, the gruesomely named ‘Alabama Reform School for Juvenile Negro Law-Breakers’. He was born, out of wedlock, to Alberta Robinson and one Vetta Green in 1922. Fred would be brought up, however, with his stepfather, William Shuttlesworth. William was a farmer who scraped a living from the cracked, dusty earth around Mount Meigs and so endeavoured to feed his eight children and, of course, his stepson. Young Fred grew up in desperate poverty (a fact that would set him apart from other leaders of the civil rights movement such as Martin Luther King, the pastor’s son who was to become Shuttlesworth’s friend, ally and sometime rival). He worked a series of manual jobs, regularly finding himself driving vast trucks along the state highways, in his teens and twenties, but, with a devout faith, he eventually earned a place to study at a seminary in Selma, where, during his training, he gained a reputation as a fiery and fearless preacher.
From Selma, the young pastor was sent to Birmingham, Alabama, to take up the leadership of First Bethel Baptist Church in 1953. Birmingham had been founded after the American Civil War in an attempt to create a centre for a new Southern industrial economy and so wean Dixie off her dependence on agriculture, which was itself, in turn, dependent on slave labour. Growth was initially explosive, earning Birmingham the nickname of ‘The Magic City’. However, it was, in the words of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, ‘the worst hit town in America’ by the effects of the Great Depression. Work became scarce, people became resentful and racial tensions bubbled over. By the fifties and sixties, Birmingham had become explosive for another reason. It earned a new nickname – Bombingham – as the Ku Klux Klan smuggled dynamite and explosives from the city’s industrial areas to wage a campaign of terror against black communities. And so it was to Bethel – not in the Holy Land but in Birmingham – that young Fred Shuttlesworth came to spread the Gospel.
It did not take long for Shuttlesworth to preach politics. Almost all the leaders of the civil rights movement – men such as Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson or Ralph Abernethy – began their careers as clergy. The fierce commitment to their flock’s common humanity in the face of daily indignities and violence meant that it was the clergy who were first to speak out. These men did not hold to the secularist mantra that politics and faith ought not to mix. Rather, they became active in marches, boycotts, votes and agitation for justice – and Fred Shuttlesworth was to become the cleric-activist par excellence.
Shuttlesworth had joined the National Association of Colored People not long after arriving in Birmingham in 1953. When it was outlawed from operating in the state of Alabama, he became active in its replacement, the Alabama Christian Movement for Civil Rights, a move which resulted in the bombing that Christmas night in 1956. Shuttlesworth, whom Martin Luther King was to describe as ‘the most courageous Civil Rights fighter in the South’, wasn’t going to give up, and so, a year later, he, King and a group of other activists and clergy founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The group had non-violence and passive resistance at the very heart of its mission statement. Shuttlesworth, who had been adamant that the Christmas bombing not be used to inflame tensions, would soon be given another opportunity to show his utter commitment to this radically non-violent creed.
On 9th September 1957, at the start of the new school year, Fred Shuttlesworth and his wife Ruby took his two daughters, Patricia and Ruby, to be enrolled in Phillips High School in downtown Birmingham. Parents across the city were doing the same thing; Phillips was a prestigious school, renowned for its good grades. It was also all-white. When Shuttlesworth and his family arrived at the school and tried to gain entry, they were set upon by a mob of Klansmen. Shuttlesworth was whipped, beaten with brass knuckles and lashed with bicycle chains. His wife was stabbed. The police were nowhere to be seen. A bruised and beaten Shuttlesworth managed to get his wife back into his car, where, still bleeding, he drove them both to hospital. On the way there, he preached an extempore sermon on the need for perfect and complete forgiveness to his children, who were still sitting, shaken, in the back seat. When he arrived at the hospital, the doctor who treated him expressed amazement at the fact that Shuttlesworth had not suffered a serious concussion. The pastor nonchalantly replied, ‘Well, doctor, the Good Lord knew I lived in a hard town, so he gave me a hard head.’ Very few men would have forgiven such an act. Even fewer would have stayed and doubled down on their efforts; many would have remained angry, more would have run. But, as we now know, Fred Shuttlesworth wasn’t raised to run.
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Shuttlesworth’s willingness to forgive as part of a commitment to overturning segregation did not, however, nullify his naturally combative streak. His language, in stark contrast to King’s classically constructed oratory, was blunt and earthy. He stated his aims in activism simply: ‘I mean to either kill segregation, or be killed by it.’ Sometimes his confrontations were not with the Birmingham City police or the Klan but with his own colleagues, resulting in even more colourful language. He once exploded at King, who had gone behind Shuttlesworth’s back (as he saw it) to negotiate with shopkeepers in Birmingham, telling him ‘you’re Mister Big, but you’re going to be Mister S-H-I-T’. He would routinely vent his frustration at King’s use of ‘flowery speeches,’ while Shuttlesworth spent time on the ground, regularly getting injured and thrown into prison. Yet, for all his confrontation, he acknowledged King’s contribution and the key role his leadership played, and, after King’s assassination in 1968, mourned his death. For all his criticism of King, Shuttlesworth was perfectly capable of playing the politician as well – it was he who, after five years of hounding, eventually persuaded King (and the global media that followed him) to come to Birmingham in 1963 for a series of demonstrations that would change the course of American history.
It was said that he took his survival on Christmas Day 1956 to be a sign from Heaven that his mission was blessed and no harm would come to him. That conviction made him an inspiring figure in a movement that seemed to be flying in the face of intractable opposition. Shuttlesworth had a habit of walking, calmly and confidently, through crowds of pro-segregation agitators, their faces purple with hate. ‘He was either insane or the most courageous man I have ever met’, as James Farmer, another prominent civil rights leader, put it. Whether it was courage, insanity or a devout faith that inspired Shuttlesworth, one thing is sure: he believed in civil rights and would neither give up nor sell out. Unfortunately for the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, the man who was to become his nemesis felt exactly the same way about segregation.
The fate of the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth was inexorably bound up with that of Theophilus Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor. Connor had first been elected to the post of Commissioner for Public Safety in Birmingham in 1936 and, with a short hiatus between 1952 and 1957 to embark on a disastrous campaign for the role of state Governor (with his primary policy being to ‘outlaw’ Communism), he would remain in that post until 1963. His comeback as Commissioner was on the back of a promise to deal with the increasing anti-segregationist agitation. Connor came to loathe Shuttlesworth, routinely raiding his parsonage, having him arrested on any charges he could concoct (including vagrancy, which meant he could keep him in prison without offering bail) and instructing his officers to use increasingly violent means to deal with the protests.
Shuttlesworth spent the years 1960–62 testing the notoriously irascible Connor’s patience to the extreme by participating in a series of sit-ins at segregated diners across Alabama (which invariably involved Shuttlesworth and his fellow protestors being showered with mustard, milkshakes, fries and phlegm by the patrons). Shuttlesworth also played a central role in organising the Freedom Rides of 1961, where a number of activists from northern states were bussed into the South to support efforts against segregation there. Shuttlesworth used every available space at the parsonage to host the freedom riders and, when a group were ambushed and their bus firebombed by a Klan-sponsored mob at Anniston, Alabama, Shuttlesworth organised a rescue convoy of fifteen cars to whisk the riders away from the very real prospect of being lynched. Later, when a group was surrounded by an angry mob in Birmingham itself, Shuttlesworth appeared and, like a latter-day Moses parting the Red Sea, glided through the crowd with an air that was, in the words of one contemporary, ‘as cool as a cucumber’. Connor was livid at Shuttlesworth’s involvement with these events – all of which put the national spotlight on how black people were treated in Alabama. But Shuttlesworth wasn’t done. In 1963, he put forward ‘Project C’ to his fellow civil rights leaders: ‘C’ for ‘Confrontation’. They were going to escalate the campaign to show the ugly underbelly of racist America not just to the nation but to the world.
After arranging for King to join the protests in Birmingham, Shuttlesworth set about mobilising the forces of his Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights to engage in protests across the city in April and May. Connor immediately took the bait; he deployed attack dogs to savage protestors, fire hoses to blast them back and liaised with the Klan in an attempt to crush Shuttlesworth once and for all. King arrived in Birmingham in early April and, on the 12th (Good Friday), he and scores of others were arrested. By 3rd May, things had come to a head – not least as Birmingham’s prisons were now full. On 7th May, Shuttlesworth mobilised a group of around two thousand young people and students to march through Birmingham in a ‘Children’s Crusade’, demanding an end to segregated institutions and businesses. Shuttlesworth was playing in an incredibly high-risk game. Would Bull take the bait and show the city up to be the sort of place that used force against children? And, if he did, was the pastor gambling with innocent lives?
In the end, Connor fell for Shuttlesworth’s gambit. He deployed dogs, armed police and water cannons on the protestors. A number were injured, but none were killed. Among those hurt was Shuttlesworth himself, who suffered the full force of a water cannon as it propelled him into a brick wall and caused multiple chest injuries. Shuttlesworth was rushed to hospital. When Bull Connor was informed of the incident, he remarked, ‘I’m sorry to have missed it – I only wish they’d carried him away in a hearse.’ But the only fatality that day was to be Bull Connor’s career. The photographers and journalists who had followed King down to Alabama documented the astonishing brutality of Connor and his men. Pictures of students being knocked to the floor by hoses, clergymen being beaten by batons, schoolchildren being savaged by dogs made front-page news across America and around the world. Editorials howled at the horrors they saw, President Kennedy publicly declaring that the pictures made him ‘feel sick’.
Birmingham’s leaders backed down. Connor was sacked and, in September that year, the city’s schools were integrated. When President Kennedy himself embraced the cause of civil rights in June 1963, he commented that, without Birmingham, none of his proposed changes would have been possible. He might as well have said ‘without Fred Shuttlesworth’.
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However, the struggle for civil rights was nowhere near over. King and Shuttlesworth continued to fight to ensure that rights for black people became more than a dream. Crucial to this was the famous marches from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 – as one contemporary put it, ‘If Birmingham killed segregation, then it was Selma that buried it.’ Shuttlesworth was there over the course of the marches, including on Bloody Sunday when the marchers attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. There, a large group of clergy from all over the country led the crowd in a peaceful procession, only to be met by batons and tear gas. Shuttleworth stood a couple of places along from King himself, linking arms with a prominent Rabbi and the Greek Orthodox Archbishop in America, his fiery Baptist background put aside in a moment of interfaith solidarity. The clerical leadership meant nothing to the Alabama police – one white minister, there in solidarity, the Reverend James Reeb, was beaten so badly that he died.
Like Birmingham, Selma shocked the nation and led President Lyndon B. Johnson to sign the Voting Rights Act into law, ensuring that the legal loopholes with which the states of the Deep South had denied their black citizens their most basic rights were closed. Again, Shuttlesworth had played a crucial part in the clerical crusade to ensure that racism was banished in a wider vision of the supposed American Jerusalem. Yet, as we know, Selma was not the end. Martin Luther King was murdered three years later. After so many years dedicated to political struggle, Shuttlesworth returned to preaching and pastoring, founding a new congregation in the Greater New Light Baptist Church in 1966. His childhood meant that he was intensely aware that political oppression had gone hand in hand with material poverty and economic abandonment for many black people in the South and so, in the 1980s, he founded the Shuttlesworth Housing Foundation, designed to tackle the blight of homelessness and poor housing in his community.
‘That Fred Shuttlesworth did not become a martyr was not for lack of trying.’ So wrote the pugnacious pastor’s biographer as his subject transitioned from ‘The Wild Man of Alabama’ to elder statesman of the civil rights movement. It was somewhat ironic that Shuttlesworth, a man who deliberately put himself in the way of bricks, bone-breaking hose blasts and bombs, should outlive almost all the other leaders of the anti-segregation movement. But outlive them he did, even surviving to see the main airport of Birmingham, Alabama, renamed Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International in May 2008. He lived until 2011, meaning he saw the election, in November 2008, of the first black president of the United States. Shuttlesworth knew as well as anyone how much further that nation had (and arguably still has) to go, but he, more than many, died knowing how far things had come, due in no small part to his life and ministry.
In Birmingham, Fred Shuttlesworth ploughed a furrow that others told him was foolish, that flew in the face of authority. Violence by the Klan couldn’t stop him, threats by Bull Connor couldn’t stop him, advice from his nearest allies couldn’t stop him. And so it was that he helped bring Dr King’s famous dream a little closer to reality. Through the sheer bloody-mindedness of Fred Shuttlesworth, hope faced down fear.
After he died, the flags on Alabama state buildings (including places where Shuttlesworth had protested, stood trial and been imprisoned) were lowered to half-mast. That the heart of the old Confederacy could honour a poor black preacher man in such a way would have seemed unthinkable in Mount Meigs all those years ago, but, in part due to his dogged determination, Birmingham, the state, the country and the world that Fred Shuttlesworth grew up in was very different from the one he left. He forced the world to change because he wasn’t going to give any ground. After all, he wasn’t raised to run.