11/21/2023 0 Comments Take five sheet music tenor sax![]() Later that year when President Kennedy introduced to Congress the legislation that became the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he told King and Shuttlesworth, “But for Birmingham, we would not be here today.” In 1963 their collaboration culminated in massive demonstrations in Birmingham to pressure downtown department stores to desegregate. Shuttlesworth was always trying to bring him back into the work and get him focused on the real campaign.” ![]() “His public appearances were crucial to raising money for the movement. “King’s attention was pulled in a lot of different directions,” McWhorter said. ![]() Shuttlesworth constantly prodded King to take more aggressive action. That year he joined with King and Abernathy to launch the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which became the guiding force of the movement. Shuttlesworth was beaten until he passed out, but he regained consciousness and managed to clamber back into the car, calmly telling the driver not to break any traffic laws as they rushed away. One of the men stabbed his wife, Ruby, in the hip. More than a dozen men with chains, brass knuckles and baseball bats were waiting for him when he drove up. In 1957, he took two of his daughters to enroll in an all-white high school in Birmingham. The next day he led 200 people onto Birmingham’s buses. The blast destroyed his humble quarters but he emerged unscathed from the wreckage. On Christmas night in 1956 Shuttlesworth was laying plans to lead a group into the white sections of buses when about 15 sticks of dynamite exploded outside the parsonage. “This deed first singled him out as the preacher courageous enough or crazy enough to defy Bull Connor,” historian Taylor Branch wrote in his chronicle of the movement’s early years. When the state of Alabama essentially outlawed the NAACP in 1956, Shuttlesworth, who had been frustrated with that group’s internal politics, started the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights to take direct action to end racial segregation. He also supported the Montgomery bus boycott, led by King, in 1955. He became an activist in Birmingham, calling for the hiring of African American police officers and joining the voter registration efforts of the National Assn. “I felt like I was a man, that I had rights,” Shuttlesworth said, recalling his reaction in a 2004 interview with the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Supreme Court had outlawed school segregation in Brown vs. He was called to a life of social activism the following year, when he was riveted by a newspaper headline on May 17, 1954, announcing that the U.S. In 1953 he took over as pastor of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham. By 1949 he was preaching at Selma’s First Baptist Church for $10 a week. He joined the Baptist Church in 1944 and by 1947 was studying for the ministry at Selma University. After graduating as class valedictorian, he worked odd jobs for a few years, including one as a truck driver on an Army Air Forces base in Mobile during World War II. Shuttlesworth managed to attend high school in a better part of town. The family grew crops on rented land to survive. Shuttlesworth’s combative nature may have developed in reaction to his stepfather, who was known to beat Shuttlesworth, his mother and eight younger siblings. Born March 18, 1922, in Montgomery County, Ala., Shuttlesworth moved to Birmingham at age 3, where he lived with his mother, Alberta, and an authoritarian stepfather, William, who had worked in the coal mines until the ore dust ruined his health.
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