by Jeremy Leaming
The nation lost more than a visionary corporate leader this week, but a towering figure of the civil rights movement, the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth.
The New York Times notes, Shuttlesworth, who died at 89 on Oct. 5 in Birmingham, Ala., was a “storied civil rights leader who survived beatings and bombings in Alabama a half-century ago as he fought alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.” (Shuttlesworth is pictured, third from right, with former members of the ACS Student Chapter at Stanford Law School.)
In Birmingham in 1963, the newspaper continues, “Shuttlesworth, an important ally of Dr. King, organized two tumultuous weeks of daily demonstrations by black children, students, clergymen and others against a rigidly segregated society.”
The brutality unleashed against the demonstrators led by the city’s racist “public safety commissioner” Bull Connor helped “galvanize the nation’s conscience,” and along with other tragic events helped lead to the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.
Diane McWhorter, author of Carry Me Home, told The Times, “Among the youthful ‘elders’ of the movement, he was Martin Luther King’s most effective foil; blunt where King was soothing, driven where King was leisurely, and most important, confrontational where King was conciliatory – meaning, critically, that he was more upsetting than King in the eyes of the white public.”