A Fire You Can't Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham's Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth

Abstract

A Fire You Can't Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham's Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. By Andrew M. Manis. Religion and American Culture. (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, c. 1999. Pp. xxxiv, 541. $29.95, ISBN 0-8173-0968-3.) Even his friends, admirers, and close family members often found the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth hard to take. Shuttlesworth was vain, egocentric, and overbearing; he gave little thought to the opinions of other people; and, in the judgment of one colleague, he was wild for publicity ... almost to the point of neurosis (p. 196). Compared to Martin Luther King Jr., his comrade in the civil rights movement, Shuttlesworth was poorly trained in theology and lacked both intellectual depth and social polish. Yet as Andrew Manis argues in this superb biography, Shuttlesworth's faults were inextricably linked to his strengths, and they made this combative clergyman indispensable to the civil rights movement. Shuttlesworth was pastor of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1956 when the state of Alabama outlawed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He stepped into the breach and, with a sense of divinely inspired mission, displayed tenacity, ingenuity, wit, and breathtaking physical courage in the teeth of persecution and threats of violence from police, politicians, and Klansmen. Shuttlesworth founded and led the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) and was also a founding member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He laid the groundwork for SCLC's 1963 protest campaign that provided the civil rights movement--then languishing and in danger of defeat--with a strategic breakthrough. Despite the fact that this victory was a joint ACMHR-SCLC effort, King reaped most of the glory. Although most of the book deals with the years from 1956 to 1963, when his subject mounted a frontal assault on the evil of segregation in Birmingham (p. 123), Manis's account of Shuttlesworth's early years is crucially important in explaining his rough-hewn strength. He was raised by a strict, caring mother and an abusive stepfather, and he received vital encouragement from black teachers in Alabama's black public schools. Shuttlesworth supported himself and a growing family through laboring jobs while he trained for the ministry at Selma University, a private Baptist institution. When the time came the church provided a springboard for civil rights leadership. His riveting preaching and audacious defiance of notorious racist Eugene Bull Connor, Birmingham's commissioner of public safety, enabled Shuttlesworth to build a strong personal following at a time when state repression made it extremely difficult for black organizations to function. …