Fred Shuttlesworth, rights leader, dies

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- At one end of the fire hose were officers deployed by Bull Connor, the notoriously racist police commissioner fond of telling his men to use sticks, dogs and whatever else was necessary to scatter peaceful black protesters.

At the business end was the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, the Birmingham, Ala., preacher who -- as much or more than any of his contemporaries, the leaders of the civil rights movement -- had a penchant for putting himself in harm's way in the name of equality.

Shuttlesworth, who survived bombings, beatings and that 1963 encounter with the fire hose that left him with chest injuries, died Wednesday at 89 at Princeton Baptist Medical Center in Birmingham, relatives and hospital officials said, half a century after his repeated refusals to back down to Connor and the Ku Klux Klan helped even the fight for civil rights in the South and beyond.

"When God made Bull Connor, one of the real negative forces in this country, he was sure to make Fred Shuttlesworth," said the Rev. Joseph Lowery, a fellow pioneer in the movement.

Shuttlesworth, a truck driver turned Baptist minister, never gained the kind of fame outside his native Alabama bestowed on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other luminaries. But without him, King might not have sent his forces to Birmingham when he did.

"Fred didn't invite us to come to Birmingham," said Andrew Young, the former Atlanta mayor and United Nations ambassador who served as an aide to King. "He told us we had to come." Shuttlesworth became pastor of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1953 and soon began openly challenging segregation despite repeated arrests and attempts on his life.

On Christmas night 1956, 16 sticks of dynamite were detonated outside his bedroom as he slept at the Bethel Baptist parsonage, eleven months after a similar attack at King's home in Montgomery, Ala. No one was injured in either bombing, although shards of glass and wood pierced Shuttleworth's coat and hat left hanging on a hook.

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The next day, Shuttlesworth led 250 people in a protest of segregation on buses. In 1957, he was beaten by a mob when he tried to enroll two of his children in an all-white school.

Admirers from King to President Barack Obama hailed Shuttlesworth's courage and determination over the years, qualities commonly attributed to the champions of the movement. But it was Shuttlesworth's sheer fearlessness that persuaded King to take the struggle to Birmingham, Young said.

"He marched into the jaws of death every day in Birmingham before we got there," Young said.

Shuttlesworth watched from a hospital bed as Obama was elected the nation's first African-American president. The year before, Obama had pushed Shuttlesworth's wheelchair across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma during a commemoration of the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march -- a moment Obama recalled yesterday in lauding Shuttlesworth as a "testament to the strength of the human spirit" and saying America owes him a "debt of gratitude."

Birmingham Mayor William Bell ordered city flags lowered to half-staff until after Shuttleworth's funeral, and Gov. Robert Bentley issued a similar decree statewide, honoring a man whose activism landed him behind bars dozens of times.

"I went to jail 30 or 40 times, not for fighting or stealing or drugs," Shuttlesworth told grade school students in 1997. "I went to jail for a good thing, trying to make a difference."