The Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, the modest clergyman with a core of steel who became a major figure in the United States civil rights movement, died Wednesday in Birmingham, Ala., where he had preached and marched and worked tirelessly and fearlessly to bring racial equality to the United States. He was 89.
King, Abernathy, Lowery, Lewis, Parks, Jackson, Evers, Young and Williams are among the names that come more readily to mind than Shuttlesworth’s in most discussions of the U.S. Civil Rights era, but that does not diminish his role, deeds or influence. He was a major figure in the movement. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called Shuttlesworth “one of the nation’s most courageous freedom fighters … a wiry, energetic and indomitable man.”
There’s no reason to dispute that assessment. Shuttesworth was beaten and arrested repeatedly, and survived bomb attacks, but that did not end his involvement in the civil rights battle. Andrew Young says that Shuttlesworth’s fearlessness was the reason King carried the civil rights battle to Birmingham. “Fred didn’t invite us to Birmingham,” Young said Wednesday. “He told us we had to come.” Every U.S. schoolchild should know what transpired in Birmingham after King arrived.
Shuttlesworth was in the middle of those events. He urged followers not “to stop marching until we get our rights,” then joined their ranks. He was injured by the spray of high-powered fire houses when “Bull” Connor,” the vicious and racist Birmingham safety commissioner, ordered them turned on demonstrators. Connor was unrepentant. When told that Shuttlesworth had been hurt by water from the hoses, Connor reportedly told a reporter that “I’m sorry I missed it … I wish they’d carried him away in a hearse.”
Shuttlesworth fought on. He was arrested so many times that he lost count. “I went to jail 30 or 40 times,” he told elementary school students in 1997, “not for fighting or stealing or drugs. I went to jail for a good thing, trying to make a difference.” He did more than try, and the nation is the better for it.
Shuttlesworth was content to remain in the background, even after he became an influential figure in the civil rights movement. He left Alabama to become the pastor of a church in Cincinnati. He remained in Ohio until 2008, when he returned to Birmingham. Eventually, recognition and honors came his way, and properly so.
In 2008, Birmingham, the city where some of the most vicious and climactic battles of the civil rights era were waged, honored his life and work with a four-day celebration that included renaming the airport there. It’s now the Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport. It is a fitting and lasting tribute to a man whose stirring advocacy of equality played a sometimes overlooked role in helping to reshape and to reorder America’s most basic values.