Update~Remembering Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, An American Hero

"The Lord knew I lived in a hard town, so he gave me a hard head."~Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth
Click here to see a photo I snapped of Reverend Shuttlesworth being pushed in his wheelchair across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama by the future President of the United States of America.

The legendary Birmingham, Alabama Civil Rights hero Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth made his transition from labor to reward on Wednesday in his beloved Bombingham.

He was the soul and heart of the Birmingham movement," Georgia Rep. John Lewis said. It was Birmingham, he said, that brought the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

"Fred Shuttlesworth had the vision, the determination never to give up, never to give in," Lewis said. "He led an unbelievable children's crusade. It was the children who faced dogs, fire hoses, police billy clubs that moved and shook the nation."

A decade before that infamous standoff between authorities and young protesters in Kelly Ingram Park, Shuttlesworth was already pushing for change in what had come to be called "Bombingham." Dozens of black homes and churches were bombed, the cases rarely investigated by the city's all-white police force. In 1955, the charismatic young pastor of Bethel Baptist Church led a delegation of ministers who petitioned for black police officers.

Reverend Shuttlesworth was known as the racist worst enemy because he was fearless.

In his 1963 book "Why We Can't Wait," King called Shuttlesworth "one of the nation's the most courageous freedom fighters ... a wiry, energetic and indomitable man."

He survived a 1956 bombing, an assault during a 1957 demonstration, chest injuries when Birmingham authorities turned fire hoses on demonstrators in 1963, and countless arrests.

"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."

Diane McWhorter, the author of “Carry Me Home,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2001 book about the struggle in Birmingham, wrote in an e-mail that Mr. Shuttlesworth was known among some civil rights activists as “the Wild Man from Birmingham.”

“Among the youthful ‘elders’ of the movement,” she added, “he was Martin Luther King’s most effective and insistent foil: blunt where King was soothing, driven where King was leisurely, and most important, confrontational where King was conciliatory — meaning, critically, that he was more upsetting than King in the eyes of the white public.”

Mr. Shuttlesworth was temperamental, even obstinate, and championed action and confrontation over words. He could antagonize segregationists and allies alike, quarreling with his allies behind closed doors.

Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth in his own words. Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years 1954-1965; Episode 101-36

You must remember that since uh, I had been building up a lot of momentum and I was known all over. So that, we say that if you don't rescind the law, we're going to ride the buses anyway, which was an implied threat. Uh, they didn't do it, the Ku Klux Klan uh, saw to it that I wouldn't be around to ride the buses, so we were going to ride the buses, I believe it was the night after Christmas, but on Christmas Night in '56 the Klan set about uh, 16 sticks of dynamite right at the head of my bed, the corner of the church, the corner of the house and I was in the bed at the point of the blast. And this dynamite went off about 9:15. It blew the wall between my head and the dynamite away, it blew the floor out from under my bed, space of I guess, 15 feet. The springs that I was lying on we never found them.

There I was lying on the mattress. I knew the relevance of Moses' statement when he said, "Underneath the everlasting arm." The roof uh, came down, all that dust, the house was about 60 years old, dynamite dust and blast was, smoke, other things were there. This is a strange thing, I, I knew that the bomb was meant for me, I knew what it was, and instantaneously, at the same time I had a sense of presence that I wouldn't get hurt. I knew that. You can know something you never read. And I, I might say to you at that moment all fear was taken from me. I never feared anything since that time.

Reverend Shuttlesworth is equally important to American history as Steve Jobs. They were two great Americans, one revolutionized Civil Rights and the other revolutionized consumer products. But in the end it can be said they helped others more than they helped themselves.

Well done thy good and faithful servants.

Rest in peace.