HONORING REV. FRED SHUTTLESWORTH

Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth was the last of the civil rights movement’s “Big Three.” Along with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, Shuttlesworth founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957.  He was a blunt-talking preacher who braved beatings, bombings and fire-hosings to push Birmingham, Alabama to the forefront of the civil rights movement with a confrontational strategy that often put him at odds with Dr. King’s peaceful strategy.  Rev. Shuttlesworth died last week at the age of 89.  Today, OK WASSUP!  honors his memory, his legacy, and his vital importance to the civil rights movement.

Although not a household name, Shuttlesworth was just as important to the movement as King was, said Diane McWhorter, who won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for her chronicle of Birmingham at the height of the movement with the book “Carry Me Home.”

“Shuttlesworth and King were the two major axes of the SCLC part of the movement,” McWhorter said. “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.”

Shuttlesworth, Abernathy, King

Shuttlesworth often spoke of how he had been bombed twice, beaten into unconsciousness and jailed more than 35 times.  He considered himself the nemesis of Eugene “Bull” Connor, Birmingham’s racist police chief, who had no liking or trust of Shuttlesworth at all. Once, Connor’s men shot Rev. Shuttlesworth with a fire-hose gun during a melee, sending him to the hospital.  Afterwards, Connor told a reporter, “I wish they’d carried him away in a hearse.”

Shuttlesworth had been in poor health for the last year and was hospitalized with breathing problems 3 weeks ago at Birmingham’s Princeton Baptist Medical Center, where he died, said family spokeswoman Malena Cunningham.

“The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth is the last of a kind,” said Georgia Democrat and civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis. “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.”