Andrew M Manis - A Fire You Cant Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birminghams Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth

Religion and American Culture

Series Editors

David Edwin Harrell

Wayne Flynt

Edith L. Blumhofer

A Fire You Can't Put Out

The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham's Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth

Andrew M. Manis

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

Copyright 1999

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 354870380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First paperback printing 2002

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencePermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.481984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Manis, Andrew Michael.

A fire you can't put out: the civil rights life of Birmingham's Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth / Andrew M. Manis.

p. cm. (Religion and American culture)

Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.

ISBN 978-0-8173-1345-6 (electronic)

ISBN 978-0-8173-1156-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Shuttlesworth, Fred L., 1922 2. Civil rights movementsAlabamaBirminghamHistory20th century. 3. Afro-AmericansCivil rightsAlabamaBirminghamHistory20th century. 4. Birmingham (Ala.)Race relations. 5. Civil rights workersAlabamaBirminghamBiography. I. Title. II. Series:

Religion and American culture (Tuscaloosa, Ala.)

E334.B69 N448 1999

305.8'960730761781dc21

996033

Cover design by Mary Frances Burt. Text design by Shari DeGraw.

To Meigan

Somewhere in these pages the reader will find a mature Fred Shuttlesworth looking back over what he called a vagabond life. Such has been the case for me in the twelve years that I have worked on the book you nowfinallyhave in your hands. Since beginning the research I have changed jobs and cities and life situations. My acknowledgments will mention helpful colleagues in four cities where I have lived and many others that I have visited. Still, one element has remained a constantthe Shuttlesworth book.

One is tempted to ask why anyone would spend such a large part of one's life reading, thinking, talking, and writing about a person of whom no one but participants in the civil rights movement and a few historians has ever heard. The most obvious answer is so that the story can get out to the wider public. There are other answers, some historical, some personal.

This is the story of probably the most unsung of the many heroes of the American civil rights movement. Put very bluntly, without Fred Shuttlesworth the 1963 Birmingham protests could not have happened, and without those demonstrations Congress would have ended racial segregation in public accommodations later than it did. That notable contribution makes Shuttlesworth's story worth spending time on. Another reason is the story's compelling drama, to which I hope I have done justice.

A few historians have written about Shuttlesworth on their way to telling the story of Martin Luther King Jr. Stephen Oates, David Levering Lewis, David Garrow, Adam Fairclough, and Taylor Branch fall into this category. In their collective work they have produced incidental vignettes of Fred Shuttlesworth's involvement in civil rights and, to a much lesser degree, of his life as an African American minister. Their works show varying degrees of appreciation for and understanding of Shuttlesworth. These historians have quite appropriately kept their cameras on King and only discuss Shuttlesworth when he came into the frame with King.

More recently, Glenn T. Eskew has focused on events in Birmingham and the persons central to the action there. No one was more central to the action than Fred Shuttlesworth. Eskew, more than anyone to date, has kept his camera on the firebrand minister from Birmingham. I have greatly profited from his insights, both from conversations and from the reading of his fine book. My story differs from his in that my camera has followed Shuttlesworth into his churches and into his home both as a child and as an adult. Eskew and the others recognize the religious and pastoral background of Shuttlesworth's civil rights life. I emphasize it because it is indispensable for understanding the persona of Fred Shuttlesworth.

I also emphasize it because of my own background. As a southern white boy who grew up in Birmingham, I remember the times depicted here. I remember the feeling that something out of the ordinary had happened the day my mother called me in from a Southside playground with the grim warning that African Americans in our town were causing trouble again. I also remember the morning I came out of Sunday school and learned that some little girls just a few years my senior had been killed in a bombing at another church not very far away.

Years later I read about those events in King's book Why We Can't Wait for my seminary ethics class. At that crucial point in my education, while I was writing a paper on white Southern Baptists' reactions to King, I happened to visit my uncle in Cincinnati, Ohio. As we talked, I offhandedly mentioned my research topic, and he asked if I had ever heard of Fred Shuttlesworth. In his construction business, it turned out, my uncle had only recently built the sanctuary of the Greater New Light Baptist Church, where Shuttlesworth was pastor. After a quick call and an hour's wait, Shuttlesworth appeared in my uncle's living room where we began the first of many conversations about his life. I interviewed him later while researching my doctoral dissertation, which became my first book, Southern Civil Religions in Conflict: Black and White Baptists and Civil Rights, 19471957. After finishing that book, as a professor at the historically black Xavier University of Louisiana, I decided that the Shuttlesworth book would be my next project.

Thus I come to this story as a former Birminghamian who grew up to be a historian of southern and African American religion. From this vantage point I try to place Shuttlesworth's story within the context of the religious experience of black people in the American South. I believe Shuttlesworth personified a significant essence of African American spirituality and the black way of being Christian. I give attention to Shuttlesworth's ministerial career, which was of course the platform from which he launched his civil rights life. Nevertheless, to a great extent his ministerial career (just to phrase it in this manner is to secularize itShuttlesworth, like most ministers, would simply say his ministry) and his civil rights activism were different sides of the same coin. I also give attention to his theological views and how they shaped his actions in civil rights and in what are nowadays called justice issues. As a historian of religion, I am best able to evaluate certain religious aspects of his life and work. I do so within the social, political, and legal contexts of these events, but I acknowledge that I do not address these concerns with as much attention or clarity as some readers might like. Finally, my narrative gives the reader a peek into the minister's family life and how it was affected by his religious and social perspectives and his civil rights involvement.

Of course, I could not have painted this picture without the aid of Fred Shuttlesworth himself. As he often quipped, he was a fighter, not a writer. He produced no great body of writings for scholars to analyze. This biography therefore is based largely, though certainly not solely, on my interviews with the subject. In several lengthy sessions that amounted to some seventy-five hours of conversation, I gathered oral information with which to supplement my written sources, of which there are very many. Some readers will take this as a sign that this is an as told to book and an apology for Shuttlesworth's interpretation of the events.