Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights

The Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) was a Civil Rights organization led by Fred Shuttlesworth that coordinated boycotts and demonstrations against segregation in Birmingham through the 1950s and 60s.

Shuttlesworth, the fiery pastor who took over the pulpit of Bethel Baptist Church in 1953, was already a leading figure in the Birmingham movement. He had already led an unsuccessful campaign to convince the Birmingham Police Department to hire black officers and accompanied Autherine Lucy and Arthur Shores in her short-lived integration of the University of Alabama. He was membership chairman for the Alabama chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and was the featured speaker in a January 1956 "Emancipation Rally" sponsored by the NAACP. Later that spring Alabama Attorney General John Patterson's successfully headed efforts to ban the NAACP from conducting activities in Alabama. As a result Shuttlesworth and fellow pastor Abraham Woods, Jr launched the ACMHR with a mass meeting at Sardis Baptist Church on June 5, 1956. A second meeting at Nelson Smith's New Pilgrim Baptist Church attracted additional members, including long-time ACMHR corresponding secretary Lola Hendricks.

Initially the ACMHR continued the NAACP's tactics of filing lawsuits challenging enforcement of the city's segregation laws and organizing African American citizens for peaceful demonstrations. On December 25, 1956 the group was in the midst of organizing a bus sit-in when Shuttlesworth's house was bombed, blasting him into the basement where he landed, relatively unscathed, still on his mattress. The experience left Shuttlesworth convinced that he was ordained to lead and contributed to his attitude of fearlessness. The sit-in brought 300 demonstrators the next morning, of whom 22 were arrested, triggering ACMHR lawsuits.

In February 1957 the ACMHR signed on as a charter member organization in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration. Shuttlesworth was named secretary of the SCLC. The next month he and his wife, Ruby challenged the segregated waiting rooms at Birmingham Terminal Station. The couple were able to board their train without incident, but those who had greeted them were met by a violent mob outside the station when they tried to leave.

In September 1957 Shuttlesworth attempted to enroll two of his daughters at Phillips HIgh School and was met by a mob armed with bats and bicycle chains. Hospitalized but undaughted, he pledged to continue the attempt each day until the school was successfully integrated. Organized opponents of civil rights, including the Ku Klux Klan and the National States Rights Party threatened and intimidated movement supporters and conducted numerous bombings of churches and residences. Most of those terrorist acts were never prosecuted and their perpetrators acted with impunity, if not complicity, from city officials and police.

In 1961 the ACMHR helped organize the Alabama leg of that summer's Freedom Rides, sponsored by the Congress for Racial Equality. The demonstrations ended with marked violence as one bus was firebombed in Anniston and another was met by an organized mob at the Birmingham Trailways Station with no police in sight. ACMHR volunteers took injured riders to the hospital and kept them in their homes until rides could be secured to safety.

By 1965 the ACMHR had initiated more federal suits that reached the United States Supreme Court than any other petitioner. In the courts most of those suits were supported by the NAACP's legal defense fund with additional funding from local supporters, including whites who were eager for change but could not risk certain retaliation for showing public support for the movement. In order to raise money and membership the group held weekly mass meetings at "movement churches" all around the city. These meetings were filled with emotional testimony, music and passionate preaching. Detectives from the Birmingham Police Department recorded the proceedings.

Shuttlesworth and the ACMHR were responsible for inviting Martin Luther King, Jr and Ralph Abernathy to come to Birmingham to lead mass demonstrations in 1963. Though King urged quick action, Shuttlesworth insisted on waiting until the 1963 Birmingham mayoral election was completed to avoid giving Bull Connor any unintentional assistance with voters wary of "outside agitators". As it happened, even Birmingham's moderate leaders opposed the campaign on the grounds that incoming mayor Albert Boutwell should be given an opportunity to lead the city through long-needed changes. King's Letter from Birmingham Jail responded directly to that call for patience.

During the campaign Shuttlesworth acted as an emotional leader for ACMHR's local membership while King, Abernathy and others made attempts to bring uncommitted parties into the movement. SCLC's Wyatt Walker planned the practical details of the campaign, later joined by the efforts of James Bevel, A. D. King, Edward Gardner, James Orange and others. The Central Committee met regularly at the A. G. Gaston Hotel to coordinate plans and issue statements to the press. As pickets and marches against segregated stores and lunch counters dragged on through the Spring without evident progress, Bevel provided the spark by enlisting young people in the mass demonstrations, finally fulfilling the goal of "filling the jails" with non-violent protesters and eventually providing the photographs and news footage of police dogs and fire hoses that shocked the world's sensibilities. A truce was announced on May 10, but the bombings continued, escalating to the murderous bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15. The events in Birmingham, both tragic and triumphant, made imperative the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

References

• White, Marjorie Longenecker (1998) A Walk to Freedom: The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, 1956-1964. Birmingham: Birmingham Historical Society. ISBN 0943994241

• Manis, Andrew (1999) A Fire You Can't Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham's Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. ISBN 0817309683

• White, Marjorie L. and Andrew Manis, eds. (2000) Birmingham Revolutionaries: The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press. ISBN 0865547092
• McWhorter, Diane (2001) Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution. New York, New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0743226488
• Harris, W. Edward (2004) Miracle in Birmingham: A Civil Rights Memoir 1954-1965. Indianapolis, Indiana: Stonework Press. ISBN 0963886479