One of the most relentless figures of the Civil Rights Movement,
the Rev. Fred Lee Shuttlesworth was born on March 18, 1922, in Montgomery County, Alabama. His biological father was Vetta Green. However, Shuttlesworth was reared by his mother, Alberta Robinson Shuttlesworth and his stepfather, William Nathan Shuttles- worth, a farmer in rural Oxmore, Alabama. Shuttlesworth mentioned to me that he had strong mentors in school, beginning with Israel Ramsey at Oxmore Elementary School. Fred  married Ruby Keeler, a nurse, in 1941 and, after a few years as a truck driver and auto mechanic, Shuttlesworth was encouraged by Rev. E.A. Palmer to attend Cedar Grove Academy, a local bible college. He completed the A.B. degree at Selma, and later attended Alabama State College. By 1950, Shuttlesworth was the pastor of First Baptist Church in Selma, Alabama, and in1953, he returned to Birmingham as pastor of Bethel Baptist Church.

In May 1956, at a mass meeting at Bethel, Shuttlesworth established the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR). In December of that year, the United States Supreme Court ruled that bus segregation in Montgomery, Alabama, was illegal. Shuttlesworth immediately announced that the ACMHR was going to test segregation laws in Birmingham. On Christmas night the Shuttlesworth house was blown up by sixteen sticks of Ku Klux Klan dynamite. Shuttlesworth, who landed in the basement and whose bedroom was blown apart, and Deacon Charles Robinson who was visiting were unharmed. Shuttlesworth, then, led a rally the very next day.

He was beaten by police in 1957 for trying to enroll his daughter in an all white school and that same year joined with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph David Abernathy and Bayard Rustin to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) … Shuttlesworth was hospitalized in 1963 as a result of being attacked by Sheriff Bull Connor's water cannons as he led a mass non-violent demonstration. However, Shuttlesworth continued to work to secure Birmingham’s public accommodations and the desegregation of its schools.

In 1966, Shuttlesworth became the pastor of the Greater New Light Baptist
Church in Cincinnati, Ohio and served as founding director of the Shuttles-
worth Housing Foundation.⁶

Leadership, Support and Protection
One day I was leaving a meeting, I was just about to step into my car and John L. Lewis pulled me out of the car. I asked him why he did it and he said, “If there is a bomb let me die, we need you.” Right then I knew that if someone was willing to give his life to save mine that I had to be fully committed to the struggle. They guarded my house for four years. I never seek to take credit, because God put me in the position of leadership. You have to lead, or get out of the way.

You Cannot Wait for Everyone to Volunteer
I hate to tell you this but 99 and 44/100s of the people voted against the movement saying just leave it alone and it will die. But if you are not willing to go, then get out of the way. The black church has to purify this democracy. The best preachers preach on Sunday and picket on Monday. We are in a divine struggle for the purification and preservation of the human race, and we must learn to live together or we will die apart.⁷ 

Born on a farm near Mayesville, South Carolina in 1875, Mary McLeod
Bethune, the 15th child of former slaves, rose from humble beginnings to
become a world-renowned educator, civil and human rights leader, champion
for women and young people, and an advisor to five U.S. presidents.  

Education was the first step in her remarkable journey. The young Mary
McLeod worked in the fields alongside her parents and siblings, until she
enrolled at the age of 10 in the one-room Trinity Presbyterian Mission School. There, she learned to read, and, as she later noted, “the whole world opened to me.” She went on to study at Scotia Seminary in North Carolina and Moody Bible Institute in Chicago with the goal of becoming a missionary. [She taught] first at the Haines Institute in Augusta, Georgia and then at the Kendall Institute in Sumpter, South Carolina, where she met and married Albertus Bethune. [At the dawning of a new century,] [t]he dream of opening her own school took Mary McLeod Bethune to Florida – first to Palatka and then to Daytona Beach, where she started [a school on the remains of a garbage dump. This school, which opened with five students,] would become Bethune-Cookman University.  

As she worked to build the school that she founded, she also became a national leader on issues related to civil rights, education, women and young people. As president of the State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, she organized the group to fight against school segregation and inadequate healthcare for black children. She later served as president of the prestigious National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NCNW) and founded the National Council of Negro Women. She was appointed to numerous national commissions including the Coolidge Administration’s Child Welfare Conference, the Hoover Administration’s National Commission on Child Welfare and Commission on Home Building and Home Ownership. She eventually became an advisor on minority affairs in the Roosevelt Administration, organizing two national conferences on the problem of black Americans.   

Wherever Dr. Bethune saw a need, she found a way to meet that need and move society closer to her vision. When a black student was turned away from the hospital in Daytona Beach, she opened a hospital to serve the black community. When the nation mobilized resources for the first and second World Wars, she pressed for the integration of the American Red Cross and Women's Army Auxiliary Corps. She led voter registration drives and anti-lynching campaigns.  

Through it all Dr. Bethune relied on faith and prayer for guidance and inspiration, saying, “Without faith, nothing is possible. With it, nothing is impossible.” Mary McLeod Bethune’s vision lives on today at the school that she founded which continues to sustain her legacy of faith, scholarship and service.

…Sometimes as I sit communing in my study I feel that death is not far off. I am aware that it will overtake me before the greatest of my dreams – full equality for the Negro in our time – is realized. Yet, I face that reality without fear or regrets. I am resigned to death as all humans must be at the proper time. Death neither alarms nor frightens one who has had a long career of fruitful toil. The knowledge that my work has been helpful to many fills me with joy and great satisfaction.¹⁰

I leave you finally a responsibility to our young people. The world around us really belongs to youth for youth will take over its future management. Our children must never lose their zeal for building a better world. They must not be discouraged from aspiring toward greatness, for they are to be the leaders of tomorrow. Nor must they forget that the masses of our people are still underprivileged, ill-housed, impoverished and victimized by discrimination. We have a powerful potential in our youth, and we must have the courage to change old ideas and practices so that we may direct their power toward good ends.

Faith, courage, brotherhood, dignity, ambition, responsibility -- these are needed today as never before. We must cultivate them and use them as tools for our task of completing the establishment of equality for the Negro. We must sharpen these tools in the struggle that faces us and find new ways of using them. The Freedom Gates are half-ajar. We must pry them fully open.

If I have a legacy to leave my people, it is my philosophy of living and serving. As I face tomorrow, I am content, for I think I have spent my life well. I pray now that my philosophy may be helpful to those who share my vision of a world of Peace, Progress, Brotherhood, and Love.¹¹