Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, an Elder Statesman for Civil Rights, Dies at 89

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While every one is giving Respects to Steve Jobs who passed away, and a smart man was he. I will like to give RESPECT to a great man who put his life on the line so i as a Hebrew Man can live in a better place.

The Last of the Big 3 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and Ralph David Abernathy who formed THE SOUTHERN CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP CONFRENCE passed away Wednesday.

Thank you for fighting for our race, R.I.P. brother and take youR white robe.

REVELATIONS 6:9 And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of YHWH, and for the testimony which they held:

6:10 And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O YHWH, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?

6:11 And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season, until their fellowservants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled.

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Fred Shuttlesworth dies at 89; hard-charging civil rights figure

Fred Shuttlesworth was the last of the civil rights movement's 'Big Three.' With the Revs. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph David Abernathy, he founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957.

Elaine Woo, Los Angeles Times

October 6, 2011

The Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, a blunt-talking preacher who braved beatings, bombings and fire-hosings to push Birmingham, Ala., to the forefront of the civil rights movement and advanced the historic fight with a confrontational strategy that often put him at odds with its most charismatic leader, died Wednesday. He was 89.

Shuttlesworth had been in poor health for the last year and was hospitalized with breathing problems three weeks ago at Birmingham's Princeton Baptist Medical Center, where he died, said family spokeswoman Malena Cunningham.

He was the last of the civil rights movement's "Big Three"; he, along with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957.

In 2004 he tried to revive the venerable civil rights group when it was beset by infighting and financial problems, but was ousted after several months as president when the board rejected his vision of greater activism.

"The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth is the last of a kind," Rep. John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat and civil rights leader, said in a statement Wednesday. "When others did not have the courage to stand up, speak up and speak out, Fred Shuttlesworth put all he had on the line to end segregation in Birmingham and the state of Alabama."

Although not a household name, Shuttlesworth was as important to the movement as King was, said Diane McWhorter, whose chronicle of Birmingham at the height of the movement, "Carry Me Home," won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

"Shuttlesworth and King were the two major axes of the SCLC part of the movement," McWhorter said Wednesday. "Shuttlesworth was in the vanguard of direct action, pushing towards confrontation. King was the person who could really deal with white people and was more conciliatory. The two of them together formed a dialectic that drove the movement forward."

By his own count, Shuttlesworth had been bombed twice, beaten into unconsciousness and jailed more than 35 times.

He saw himself as the nemesis of Eugene "Bull" Connor, Birmingham's racist police chief, who returned the animosity. After Connor's men shot the reverend with a fire-hose gun during a melee, sending him to the hospital, Connor told a reporter, "I wish they'd carried him away in a hearse."

Born March 18, 1922, in Montgomery County, Ala., Shuttlesworth moved to Birmingham at age 3, where he lived with his mother, Alberta, and an authoritarian stepfather, William, who had worked in the coal mines until the ore dust ruined his health. Shuttlesworth's combative nature may have developed in reaction to his stepfather, who was known to beat Shuttlesworth, his mother and eight younger siblings. The family grew crops on rented land to survive.

Shuttlesworth managed to attend high school in a better part of town. After graduating as class valedictorian, he worked odd jobs for a few years, including one as a truck driver on an Army Air Forces base in Mobile during World War II.

He joined the Baptist Church in 1944 and by 1947 was studying for the ministry at Selma University. By 1949 he was preaching at Selma's First Baptist Church for $10 a week.

In 1953 he took over as pastor of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham. He was called to a life of social activism the following year, when he was riveted by a newspaper headline on May 17, 1954, announcing that the U.S. Supreme Court had outlawed school segregation in Brown vs. Board of Education. "I felt like I was a man, that I had rights," Shuttlesworth said, recalling his reaction in a 2004 interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

He became an activist in Birmingham, calling for the hiring of African American police officers and joining the voter registration efforts of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People. He also supported the Montgomery bus boycott, led by King, in 1955.

When the state of Alabama essentially outlawed the NAACP in 1956, Shuttlesworth, who had been frustrated with that group's internal politics, started the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights to take direct action to end racial segregation. "This deed first singled him out as the preacher courageous enough or crazy enough to defy Bull Connor," historian Taylor Branch wrote in his chronicle of the movement's early years.

On Christmas night in 1956 Shuttlesworth was laying plans to lead a group into the white sections of buses when about 15 sticks of dynamite exploded outside the parsonage. The blast destroyed his humble quarters but he emerged unscathed from the wreckage. The next day he led 200 people onto Birmingham's buses.

In 1957, he took two of his daughters to enroll in an all-white high school in Birmingham. More than a dozen men with chains, brass knuckles and baseball bats were waiting for him when he drove up. One of the men stabbed his wife, Ruby, in the hip. Shuttlesworth was beaten until he passed out, but he regained consciousness and managed to clamber back into the car, calmly telling the driver not to break any traffic laws as they rushed away.

That year he joined with King and Abernathy to launch the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which became the guiding force of the movement.

Shuttlesworth constantly prodded King to take more aggressive action. "King's attention was pulled in a lot of different directions," McWhorter said. "His public appearances were crucial to raising money for the movement. Shuttlesworth was always trying to bring him back into the work and get him focused on the real campaign."

In 1963 their collaboration culminated in massive demonstrations in Birmingham to pressure downtown department stores to desegregate. Later that year when President Kennedy introduced to Congress the legislation that became the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he told King and Shuttlesworth, "But for Birmingham, we would not be here today."

Shuttlesworth often said that he "tried to get killed in Birmingham" to draw attention to the injustices. His rough-edged approach alienated many of the more bourgeois elements of the movement, but he made no apologies. ? , he said after the explosion that nearly took his life, "made me bomb-proof" and blew him into history.

His first wife died in 1971. He is survived by his second wife, Sephira Bailey Shuttlesworth, five children, 14 grandchildren, 20 great-grandchildren, a great-great grandchild, five sisters and two brothers.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD_Hg5uFXUU

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By JON NORDHEIMER
Published: October 5, 2011

The Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, a storied civil rights leader who survived beatings and bombings in Alabama a half-century ago as he fought against racial injustice alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., died on Wednesday in Birmingham, Ala. He was 89.


The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth in Montgomery, Ala., in 2007.
He died at Princeton Baptist Medical Center, his wife, Sephira Bailey Shuttlesworth, said. He also lived in Birmingham.

It was in that city in the spring of 1963 that Mr. Shuttlesworth, an important ally of Dr. King, organized two tumultuous weeks of daily demonstrations by black children, students, clergymen and others against a rigidly segregated society.

Graphic scenes of helmeted police officers and firefighters under the direction of T. Eugene (Bull) Connor, Birmingham’s intransigent public safety commissioner, scattering peaceful marchers with fire hoses, police dogs and nightsticks, provoked a national outcry.

The brutality helped galvanize the nation’s conscience, as did the Ku Klux ? ’s bombing of a black church in Birmingham that summer, which killed four girls at Sunday school. Those events led to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, after the historic Alabama marches that year from Selma to Montgomery, which Mr. Shuttlesworth also helped organize. The laws were the bedrock of civil rights legislation.

“Without Fred Shuttlesworth laying the groundwork, those demonstrations in Birmingham would not have been as successful,” said Andrew M. Manis, author of “A Fire You Can’t Put Out,” a biography of Mr. Shuttlesworth. “Birmingham led to Selma, and those two became the basis of the civil rights struggle.”

Mr. Shuttlesworth, he added, had “no equal in terms of courage and putting his life in the line of fire” to battle segregation.

Mr. Shuttlesworth joined with Dr. King in 1957 as one of the four founding ministers of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the engine of Dr. King’s effort to unify the black clergy and their flocks to combat Jim Crow laws. At the time, Mr. Shuttlesworth was leader of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, which he had helped form in 1956 to replace the Alabama offices of the N.A.A.C.P., shut down for years by court injunction.

Outside their roles as men of the cloth and civil rights advocates, however, Mr. Shuttlesworth and Dr. King stood in sharp contrast to each other in terms of background, personality and strategies.

Dr. King was a polished product of Atlanta’s black middle class. A graduate of Morehouse College, he held a Ph.D. in systematic theology from Boston University. Fred Shuttlesworth was a child of poor black Alabama whose ministerial degree was from an unaccredited black school. (He later earned a master’s degree in education from Alabama State College.)

Where Dr. King could deliver thunderous oratory and move audiences by his reasoned convictions and faith, Mr. Shuttlesworth was fiery, whether preaching in the pulpit or standing up to Bull Connor, who dueled with him for years in street protests and boycotts leading up to their historic 1963 showdown.

Diane McWhorter, the author of “Carry Me Home,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2001 book about the struggle in Birmingham, wrote in an e-mail that Mr. Shuttlesworth was known among some civil rights activists as “the Wild Man from Birmingham.”

“Among the youthful ‘elders’ of the movement,” she added, “he was Martin Luther King’s most effective and insistent foil: blunt where King was soothing, driven where King was leisurely, and most important, confrontational where King was conciliatory — meaning, critically, that he was more upsetting than King in the eyes of the white public.”

Mr. Shuttlesworth was temperamental, even obstinate, and championed action and confrontation over words. He could antagonize segregationists and allies alike, quarreling with his allies behind closed doors.

But few doubted his courage. In the years before 1963 he was arrested time and again — 30 to 40 times by his count — on charges aimed at impeding peaceful protests. He was repeatedly jailed and twice the target of bombs.

In one instance, on Christmas night 1956, he survived an attack in which six sticks of dynamite were detonated outside his parsonage bedroom as he lay in bed. “The wall and the floor were blown out,” Ms. McWhorter wrote, “and the mattress heaved into the air, supporting Shuttlesworth like a magic carpet.”

When he tried to enroll his children in an all-white school in 1957, Klansmen attacked him with bicycle chains and brass knuckles. When a doctor treating his head wounds marveled that he had not suffered a concussion, Mr. Shuttlesworth famously replied, “Doctor, the Lord knew I lived in a hard town, so he gave me a hard head.”

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Freddie Lee Robinson was born on March 18, 1922, in rural Mount Meigs, Ala. He took the surname Shuttlesworth from a man his mother, Alberta Robinson, later married. He had eight siblings, and the family supplemented its income by sharecropping and making moonshine liquor, an activity for which Mr. Shuttlesworth was sentenced to two years’ probation in 1940.

He was a truck driver in the early 1940s but was soon drawn to pulpits in Selma and Birmingham. He became pastor of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1953 and joined the Alabama chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. before it was outlawed from the state in 1956. He and others established the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights to carry on the chapter’s work and came to challenge the ? structure on many fronts.

In 1963 he welcomed Dr. King to Birmingham to take part in the protests. They planned a boycott of white merchants coupled with large marches that they expected would provoke overreaction by city officials and show the world the depth of white resistance.

“We wanted confrontation, nonviolent confrontation, to see if it would work,” Mr. Shuttlesworth later said. “Not just for Birmingham — for the nation. We were trying to launch a systematic, wholehearted battle against segregation, which would set the pace for the nation.”

Mr. Shuttlesworth suffered chest injuries when the pummeling spray of fire hoses was turned on him. “I’m sorry I missed it,” Mr. Connor said when told of the injuries, The New York Times reported in 1963. “I wish they’d carried him away in a hearse.”

After 1965, with the new civil rights legislation on the books and Dr. King turning his attention to poverty and black problems in the urban North, Mr. Shuttlesworth remained focused on local issues in Birmingham and Cincinnati, where he had moved to take the pulpit of a black church. He traveled frequently between Ohio and Alabama before returning permanently to Birmingham in 2008 for treatment after suffering a stroke the previous year.

Besides his wife, Mr. Shuttlesworth is survived by four daughters, Patricia Massengill, Ruby “Ricky” Bester, Carolyn Shuttlesworth and Maria Murdock; a son, Fred Jr.; a stepdaughter, Audrey Wilson; five sisters, Betty Williams, Truzella Brazil, Ernestine Grimes, Iwilder Reid and Eula Mitchell; 14 grandchildren; 20 great-grandchildren; and one great-great-grandchild.

With the death of Dr. King, and later Dr. King’s chief aide, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Mr. Shuttlesworth eventually assumed the role of elder statesman in the civil rights movement. In 2004 he was named president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but he stepped down the same year, complaining that “deceit, mistrust and a lack of spiritual discipline and truth have eaten at the core of this once-hallowed organization.”

He also came under criticism by ? rights advocates in 2004 when he lent his name to a campaign in Cincinnati to stop the city from passing a ? rights ordinance.

He remained an honored figure in Birmingham, however. In 2008, the city renamed its principal airport Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport.

In 2009, in a wheelchair, he was front and center among other dignitaries in an audience of about 6,000 at the city’s Boutwell Auditorium to watch a live broadcast as the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama, was sworn in.

He had encountered Mr. Obama, then a senator from Illinois, two years earlier, along with former President Bill Clinton, during a commemoration in Selma of the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights marches. As a crowd crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where demonstrators were beaten and tear-gassed on “? Sunday,” March 7, 1965, Mr. Obama pushed Mr. Shuttlesworth’s wheelchair.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b8HRidhy28

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why yall ? eating pork grinds, watchin bet's Hot mess and jukin and jivin takin ? for granted look what these brothers and sisters did for yall ungrateful ass.

Havin nat turner, Malcolm, Harriet Tubman and them turnin in their graves

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9kT1yO4MGg

Dr.Chemix

Lol, yea you see that? "After Steve Jobs died, lets talk about what he did for black folks that you didn't know he was doing but you do now". ? is hilarious. People really need to stop getting fed by that tube...? is feeding poison, heavy poison to these super smart dummies.

But on the real, we lost a great who is forever a part of our legacy.

R.I.P. Mr. Shuttlesworth

I bow my head for the passing of our elder great

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Dr.Chemix wrote: »

Lol, yea you see that? "After Steve Jobs died, lets talk about what he did for black folks that you didn't know he was doing but you do now". ? is hilarious. People really need to stop getting fed by that tube...? is feeding poison, heavy poison to these super smart dummies.

But on the real, we lost a great who is forever a part of our legacy.

R.I.P. Mr. Shuttlesworth

I bow my head for the passing of our elder great

word up, i look in the reason and there was a thread on Steve Jobs but not one on REV. SHUTTLEWORTH.

LOOK ON THE FRONT PAGE ON AHH THERE WAS STEVE JOBS BUT THERE IS NO REV SHUTTLEWORTH, a hip-hop site that didnt pay no respect to REV SHUTTLEWORTH who pave the way for us. SMH