Fred Shuttlesworth, The Man Birmingham Could Not Break

On Christmas Day in nineteen fifty-six, someone placed a bomb under the parsonage of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham while Fred Shuttlesworth and his family were inside. The explosion damaged the building badly. Shuttlesworth walked out unhurt, turned to the crowd that had gathered, and told them to go home and tell Bull Connor that he would not leave Birmingham.

Shuttlesworth had founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights seven months earlier, in May of nineteen fifty-six, after Alabama's attorney general outlawed the state NAACP chapter. The ACMHR filled the void, raising money through weekly mass meetings, filing lawsuits against Birmingham's segregation ordinances, and organizing direct action. It was the most effective civil rights organization in the city and it was built around one man.

Shuttlesworth was not given to caution. He rode Birmingham's newly integrated buses in nineteen fifty-six and was beaten for it. In nineteen fifty-seven, he attempted to enroll his children at an all-white school and was attacked by a Klan mob with brass knuckles and bicycle chains. He was hospitalized more than once. His church was bombed more than once. He kept going.

In nineteen sixty-three, Shuttlesworth invited Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to bring their resources to Birmingham, arguing that the city's entrenched resistance made it the right place to force a national confrontation. King came. The resulting campaign, documented by every major news organization in the country, changed the political calculus in Washington.

Shuttlesworth is sometimes described as the man without whom the Birmingham campaign could not have happened. He had been building toward it for seven years before King arrived.