Fred Shuttlesworth

Frederick Lee Shuttlesworth (born March 18, 1922 in Mugler) was pastor of Bethel Baptist Church, a founder of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and a tireless leader of Birmingham's Civil Rights Movement.

Shuttlesworth was born in the community of Mugler, in Montgomery County. He was raised on a farm in the Oxmoor community near Birmingham by his mother, Alberta Robinson Shuttlesworth and stepfather William Nathan Shuttlesworth. He attended Oxmoor Elementary School where he was taught by Israel Ramsey. He entered high school at Wenonah High School, but transferred to Rosedale High School before graduating in 1940.

In 1941, Shuttlesworth married nurse Ruby Keeler. The couple moved to Mobile a year later, where he took a job as a truck driver and started studying to become a mechanic. His pastor there, E. A. Palmer, encouraged him to enter Bible college at the Cedar Grove Academy.

He delivered a sermon at Selma University, a Baptist theological school, in 1945 and decided to follow the call to preaching. He entered that institution, graduating with an A.B. in 1951 while he was pastor of the First (Colored) Baptist Church. He went on to get another A.B. from the Alabama State College in Montgomery, which he completed in 1953. Later that year he returned to Birmingham to accept the pastorate of Bethel Baptist Church, where he soon became a leader in the emerging campaign by African Americans to secure fundamental civil rights.

Civil Rights campaign

1956

At the start of 1956, Shuttlesworth was working as the membership chairman for the Alabama chapter of the Batlimore-based National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. On May 26 of that year, the NAACP was barred by state law from continuing to operate in Alabama, so Shuttlesworth and Ed Gardner of Mount Olive Baptist Church founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights to continue that work. The new group was born at a mass meeting at Sardis Baptist Church on June 5.

In December 1956 the United States Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation on buses in Montgomery was illegal. He announced that the ACMHR would test Birmingham's enforcement of similar segregation laws. On Christmas night that year, his house was bombed. Though he was blown into the basement, he and his family and guests were unharmed. He led a group on board a Birmingham bus the next day and sued the city after the demonstrators were arrested.

References

• White, Marjorie Longenecker (1998) A Walk to Freedom: The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Birmingham: Birmingham Historical Society. ISBN 0943994241
• Manis, Andrew M. (Summer-Fall 2000) "Birmingham's Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth: unsung hero of the civil rights movement." Baptist History and Heritage. - accessed January 17, 2007