Remembering Civil Rights Activist Fred Shuttlesworth
Sixty-seven years ago yesterday, on Dec 25, 1956, pioneering civil rights activist Fred Shuttlesworth survived a Ku Klux Klan bombing.
Fred Shuttlesworth somehow survived the KKK bombing that took out his home next to the Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
An arriving policeman advised him to leave town fast. In the “Eyes on the Prize” documentary, Shuttlesworth quoted himself as replying, “Officer, you’re not me. You go back and tell your Klan brethren if God could keep me through this, then I’m here for the duration.’”
Months later, he and his family were beaten after trying to enroll his daughters in an all-white school.
They beat him with fists, chains and brass knuckles. His wife, Ruby, was stabbed in the hip, trying to get her daughters back in the car. His daughter, Ruby Fredericka, had her ankle broken. When the examining physician was amazed the pastor failed to suffer worse injuries, Shuttlesworth said, “Well, doctor, the Lord knew I lived in a hard town, so he gave me a hard head.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called him “the most courageous civil rights fighter in the South”. You can learn more about the bombing at the Equal Justice Initiative and about Shuttlesworth at the King Institute, in this hour-long documentary. and Andrew Manis’s 1999 biography of Shuttlesworth, A Fire You Can’t Put Out.
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