People sometimes ask me why I wrote a book about civil rights.
I am white and I was too young to have been involved in the glory days of the movement. I was two years old when the March on Washington took place in 1963. I was seven when Martin Luther King was killed in 1968. No one I knew was involved in the movement. I came from a family of conservative Republicans, whose heroes were Eisenhower, Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, and Dole. So what gives?
The answer is simple, really. The civil rights movement was never just about blacks. It was about America. It was about doing the right thing and granting everyone their basic rights. The movement was mine too, and its legacy is mine. I never suffered the way blacks did under segregation. I always enjoyed every advantage a person can ask for. But I would have missed so much if this movement didn’t happen.
One of my greatest advantages, then, was to have grown up in a nation that was transformed and redeemed by the civil rights movement. Martin and Coretta King, Bayard Rustin, Philip Randolph, Ella Baker, James Lawson, John Lewis, Anna Hedgman, Daisy Bates and the Little Rock Nine, Linda Brown and the other Brown litigants, Wyatt Walker, Thurgood Marshall, Fred Shuttlesworth, James Baldwin — the list goes on, for pages and pages of history — were my inspirations too.
I grew up in a better place because of these people.
These thoughts come to mind with the passing of Fred Shuttlesworth, the Birmingham preacher who was one of Martin Luther King’s core cadre of preacher-activists. I had the privilege of meeting Shuttlesworth a few years ago. And I got to share something with him.
Like so many, Fred Shuttlesworth put his life on the line, many times, to confront racism’s evils. But rather than adopting a dour or negative attitude, he approached life with joy. People used to say Hubert Humphrey embodied the “politics of joy,” which was true. But so did the civil rights movement. You can’t do what that bunch did without a song and dance in your heart.
Shuttlesworth was a young preacher at Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham and a key figure in the NAACP when the state outlawed the NAACP (really). So Shuttlesworth helped to create the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. And when the Brown decision came down, he rallied people to confront segregation in all its forms in Alabama. For that the Klan bombed his home, but Shuttlesworth was defiant. Klansmen tried to kill him at other times too, but he kept going. He was part of the founding of King’s umbrella organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Unlike other senior members in the movement, he took part in sit-ins and the freedom rides.
He was a rabble-rouser. He raised hell. He spoke bluntly. He didn’t back down.
In 1963 Shuttlesworth asked King to come to Birmingham, the most violent of the big cities of the South, to crush segregation. He had already left town for Cincinnati after his church resisted his activist approach. But he remained active in Birmingham. His thinking was simple: If you can beat segregation there, you can beat it anywhere. King, fresh from a devastating defeat in Albany, Georgia, agreed. The rest is history: Sheriff Bull Connor and his thugs beat protesters and sicced dogs on them. Hundreds marched and hundreds got hauled off to jail. King was jailed and penned “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” the seminal document of civil disobedience. And, finally, the Children’s Crusade swelled the marches and then the kids broke away and slipped into the city’s business district. Businesses demanded a settlement. Segregation suffered its greatest defeat.
As I was researching my book Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the 1963 March on Washington (Beacon Press, 2010), I spent a day sifting through the archives at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. I suddenly realized that Fred Shuttlesworth was in town. I don’t know why I forgot, but I did. I had also forgotten that he had recently suffered a stroke. I called his home and talked to his wife. She told me he was living in a nursing home.
“Why don’t you visit him?” she said. “He loves getting visitors. He would like to see you. And if you could bring him a vanilla milkshake, he’d love it.”
And so I did. I found him propped up in bed watching TV. A nurse introduced us. The stroke robbed him of his ability to speak. So I talked.
I told him about my book, who I had interviewed, the material I gathered. He barely responded. I asked him if he wanted the shake. He nodded, barely. I brought the straw to his lips and he sipped. I talked some more. He sipped some more.
Then I told him I had something I needed to tell him. His eyes moved toward me for the first time.
I told him I needed to thank him for what he did. I understood that he was fighting for his people. But he was also fighting for something bigger. I told him I was one of the biggest beneficiaries of the movement. I could not imagine growing up in a world where I smugly believed I was superior because I was white. He saved me from that.
He responded for the first time. He mouthed: “I know.”
Then I remembered that I had a recording of his speech at the March on Washington. WBUR allowed me listen to recordings of the Educational Radio Network’s coverage of the March. So I spent three days at WBUR, transcribing the recordings. But I liked Shuttlesworth’s speech so much that I downloaded it. (Sorry, WBUR guys.)
“Reverend Shuttlesworth, do you want to hear your speech at the March on Washington?”
He smiled and nodded.
I pulled my laptop out of the case and held it near his head. I clicked and together we listened to his crackling speech.
In the days before the March, Shuttlesworth was annoyed that he was left off the roster of speakers. The afternoon program was restricted to the heads of the ten cosponsors of the March. But the program was delayed while March leaders settled a controversy over John Lewis’s speech. Catholic leaders threatened to pull out of the March to protest Lewis’s speech. They saw a draft the night before and considered it too radical and incendiary. To stall for time, Shuttlesworth was asked to speak. Without any preparation, he belted out a classic.
We didn’t come to molest nor to cajole, we came to be peaceful and loving and law abiding because we are a law-abiding people. We came because we love our country. We came because our country needs us and we need our country. We came to serve notice that if our country wants peace and tranquility and quiet, they might as well just free the Negro because until the Negro is freed nobody else will be free. …
We’re going to march. We’re going to walk together, we’re going to stand together, we’re going to sing together, we’re going to stay together, we’re going to moan together, we’re going to groan together, and after a while we’ll have freedom! Freedom! Freedom now!
As his words ended and the crowd roared, a tear ran down Fred Shuttlesworth’s cheek. He had never heard a recording of his speech before. Now he was back in that moment again.
And now he’s gone. But he left a big part of himself behind, the way all those other heroes of the movement did.
Godspeed, Reverend Shuttlesworth. And, once again, thank you.
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