Shuttlesworth, Frederick Lee
1922-2011 · Contribution: 1953-1969
Co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King Jr. in 1957 and led the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, organizing the 1963 Birmingham Campaign that Dr. King credited as decisive in securing passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, while surviving multiple assassination attempts including the 1956 bombing of his church parsonage
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Impact on the world
As pastor of Birmingham's Bethel Baptist Church beginning in 1953, Shuttlesworth launched his civil rights career in 1955 by petitioning the city council to integrate the police force, and after Alabama outlawed the NAACP from operating in the state in 1956, he founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights to continue the fight; he survived a Ku Klux Klan bombing of his parsonage on Christmas night 1956 unharmed, and in 1957 was severely beaten with chains and brass knuckles while attempting to enroll his daughters in an all-white Birmingham high school. Known as the most confrontational of the movement's “Big Three” alongside King and Ralph Abernathy, Shuttlesworth co-founded the SCLC in 1957, helped organize and protect the 1961 Freedom Riders after they were nearly killed in Anniston and Birmingham, and issued the 1963 “Birmingham Manifesto” that launched Project C, the direct-action campaign of mass demonstrations that produced some of the civil rights movement's most consequential images and outcomes; his 1969 Supreme Court case, Shuttlesworth v. Birmingham, overturned his conviction for violating the city's discriminatory parade-permit ordinance. He later founded the Shuttlesworth Housing Foundation in Cincinnati in 1988 to help low-income families buy homes, received the Presidential Citizens Medal from President Clinton in 2001, and had Birmingham's international airport renamed in his honor in 2008.
Life & background
Born Freddie Lee Robinson on March 18, 1922, in Mount Meigs, Alabama, and raised on his stepfather's Oxmoor farm, Shuttlesworth was ordained a Baptist minister in 1948 and earned degrees from Selma University and Alabama State College before becoming pastor of Birmingham's Bethel Baptist Church in 1953. He led the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights from 1956 to 1969 while also pastoring a Cincinnati, Ohio, congregation from 1961 onward, continued preaching into his eighties, and died in Birmingham on October 5, 2011, at age 89.
Sources
- Encyclopedia of Alabama; Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute; National Park Service
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