Birmingham-Shuttlesworth Airport, A Name Fought For
Near Birmingham, Alabama
The airport northwest of downtown Birmingham has been operating since nineteen thirty-one, when it opened as Birmingham Municipal Airport on a piece of flat ground in Jefferson County. For most of its first seven decades, it bore various names that described location or function. Then, in two thousand eight, the airport authority voted to rename it the Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport, in honor of the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth.
The vote was not uncontroversial. Shuttlesworth was still alive in two thousand eight, eighty-six years old, and had returned to live in Birmingham the year before after retiring from his Cincinnati pastorate. Some people argued that airports should not be named after living people. Others argued that Shuttlesworth had received far less public recognition than his contemporaries and that the city owed him something more lasting than gratitude.
The case for the renaming was straightforward to those who made it. Fred Shuttlesworth had founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights in Birmingham in nineteen fifty-six and had spent the following seven years organizing, marching, filing lawsuits, absorbing beatings, surviving two bombings, and eventually inviting Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to bring the national civil rights movement to Birmingham's streets. The resulting campaign in the spring of nineteen sixty-three generated the photographs and the political pressure that moved Congress toward the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty-four.
Without Shuttlesworth, the argument ran, King might never have come. And without Birmingham in sixty-three, the Act's timeline might have stretched much further.
Shuttlesworth died on October fifth, two thousand eleven, less than three years after the airport took his name. He was buried in Birmingham, in the city he had refused to leave in nineteen fifty-six when a bomb went off under his church. The airport remains the only major American aviation facility named for a civil rights leader.
