Fred Shuttlesworth and I grew up just a few miles from each other. He was Black and I am white. He lived in a city nicknamed “Bombingham,” while I lived in what white people called “the City of Churches.”
How’s that for irony? Shuttlesworth became a Baptist minister on the north side of town; I studied for the Baptist ministry on the south side.
A few days before he died, he and I were on the phone together, although he was unable to speak. But his wife said: “Here. Say a few words to him. He’ll hear you.”
Andrew Manis
My words went something like this: “Fred, this is Andrew Manis. I’m praying you will feel God’s presence in these days as you always have. I want to tell you how much it has meant to me to tell your story and how honored I am that you trusted me with it. Thank you for using your life to at least begin to liberate America — whites as well as Blacks — from the evils of racism. Thank you for leaving America better than you found it.”
Thus ended a 38-year conversation between two Baptists ministers from Birmingham.
Why does Fred Shuttlesworth matter and why should we care?
What of the life of a lesser-known country preacher who heard God tell him to get up and transcend the typical activities of an African American pastor in a small church in Birmingham to become, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “one of the nation’s most courageous freedom fighters.”
Why should a guy who grew up on the better side of the Birmingham tracks go into the ministry, attend a Baptist seminary and spend more than half his life writing and speaking about this Black brother from Birmingham?
Shuttlesworth matters because his life was “a fire you couldn’t put out” until every vestige of unfreedom was incinerated into a pile of ashes.
He labored for seven years in a virtual police state where many of the police took as many orders from Robert Shelton, grand wizard of the Klan, as they did from “Bull” Connor. He labored alone and in obscurity, at least until a beating at Phillips High School put him on the front page of The New York Times.
Dynamited parsonage of Fred L. Shuttlesworth. The 1956 bombing was in retaliation for his leadership in the struggle against segregated busing. His children were injured in the Christmas night blast. (Photo by Don Cravens/Getty Images)
All that time, however, he knew two things in his bones. One was that bringing King and SCLC to join forces with him and his Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights would “shake up America.” Second, he vowed to “kill segregation or be killed by it.”
That he did not become another of the many martyrs who died trying to slay the dragon of segregation was not for lack of trying.
After a time of polite, respectful asking, Shuttlesworth began trying to shame King into joining him in fighting Connor. He wrote pointed letters mocking King’s “flowery speeches” and reminding him that sooner or later some real action would be necessary. Fred always chose the “sooner.”
Shuttlesworth kept pushing King — sometimes pushing him more than he wanted to be pushed. But he pushed Martin Luther King into greatness by cajoling him to come to Birmingham for what became the turning point of the movement. King needed to be pushed. America needed to be pushed. And in the process, as Andrew Young has said, Shuttlesworth saved the Civil Rights Movement that sought “to redeem the soul of America” from America’s original sins of slavery and white supremacy.
“Every time in American history there has been an advance for Black America, white America has found a way to push back on that progress.”
We should care because every time in American history there has been an advance for Black America, white America has found a way to push back on that progress. The instances are too many to mention, but trust me, if you look, you will find them.
We ended slavery with the bloodiest war in our history, but white America built it back in a different form called segregation.
We dismantled segregation and protected Black voting rights during the Civil Rights Movement, but 60 years later we make laws to make voting more difficult rather than easier.
We surprised the entire world by electing an African American man to the White House and, as columnist Leonard Pitts once surmised: White America went crazy. Then 81% of white evangelicals elected Donald Trump as president — twice.
And now our country is more divided by race than at any time since the first Civil War. I say the first because Christian nationalists and Proud Boys and American Nazis keep promising a second one is coming.
The truth is the fire of Fred Shuttlesworth, the fire to be free, won’t go out because white America keeps pouring more fuel on the fire.
So now we live in a time when Americans in power ignore the Constitution and curtail freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and the rule of law. That’s why we need several million Fred Shuttlesworths in the streets demanding that America be better than we’ve allowed ourselves to become.
It is why we need ordinary, regular, every-day, unpolished Americans committed and courageous enough to stand up and nonviolently risk their own lives for the sake of others. And while they’re out there, those millions should stand up and say, as Fred Shuttlesworth would if he were alive today: “No! Hell No! A thousand times No! You will not carry out your divisive, authoritarian, white supremacist, xenophobic, inhumane and inhuman agenda. You will not Make America Great Again at the expense of our freedoms.”
We should learn from the legacy and imitate the spirit and life of Fred Shuttlesworth.
Andrew M. Manis earned a Ph.D. in American religious history at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., and is retired professor of history at Middle Georgia State University in Macon, Ga. He also is author of A Fire You Can’t Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham’s Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, which is soon to be a documentary film by Mercy Pictures.