An American hero: Fred Shuttlesworth, 1922-2011

[Better Believe It]

An American hero: Fred Shuttlesworth, 1922-2011
By ANDRW MANIS
October 9, 2011

Shuttlesworth repeatedly pestered Martin Luther King Jr., to join forces with him and his own organization, and launch a double-barrelled nonviolent assault on segregation. Shuttlesworth convinced King that if they could defeat segregation in Birmingham, they could defeat it in all of America.

It was Shuttlesworth who braved the famous dogs and firehoses in the 1963 demonstrations. And it was Shuttlesworth’s (not primarily King’s) demonstrations that finally convinced President John F. Kennedy that civil rights was, in the president’s own words, a moral issue “as old as the scriptures and as clear as the Constitution.” That conviction led him to introduce into Congress what a year later became the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Later, I would become Shuttlesworth’s biographer. Now, I teach my students about a hero whose unsurpassed courage put him in a position to lose life and limb in his efforts to liberate his people from segregation more often than anyone in the black freedom struggle. But his struggles also helped liberate white people from our centuries-old arrogance that convinced us that our white skin made of us a superior race.

Shuttlesworth’s courage saw his church bombed three times, put him in jail about 30 times, got him beaten with bats and bicycle chains at least once, and almost got him drowned in a Klan confrontation at a beach in St. Augustine, Fla.



Rev. Fred Shuttleswworth

Read the full article at:

http://www.macon.com/2011/10/09/1735407/an-american-hero-fred-shuttlesworth.html

[Brother Buzz]

1. "This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine!"

With that light he ignited "a fire you can’t put out,"

[Overseas]

2. K&R.

[EFerrari]

3. Kick

[hfojvt]

4. meh

How many animated movies did his company make? That's what heroes do.