Fred Shuttlesworth Quotes

Confrontation is not bad. Goodness is supposed to confront evil.

It's a sin and a shame before God that these people who govern us would let things come to such a sad state. But God is not dead. --Fred Shuttlesworth

Boys step back. Men step forward.

I always believed the movement leaders had to be a little wild-haired. Like that fearless Fred Shuttlesworth. I swear, that man was from another world. This might surprise you, but I thought we had turned a corner by the seventies. I knew racism still existed, but I was hopeful that Black Power and education would sustain us and keep it at bay. We’d been to hell and back, so the seventies had to get better.

Trocmé was disagreeable in the same magnificent sense as Jay Freireich, and Wyatt Walker, and Fred Shuttlesworth. And the beauty of the disagreeable is that they do not make calculations like the rest of us. ... had nothing to lose ... warned that he was risking his career. He was heckled and abandoned by his peers... but he had been through worse. ... what was left was stubbornness and defiance. He didn't care. If you are Goliath, how on earth do you defeat someone who thinks like that? You could kill him, of course. ... The excess use of force creates legitimacy problems, and force without legitimacy leads to defiance, not submission.

What was the alternative? To go along with the accommodationists, who would integrate at the pace white Birmingham set? To believe that the eloquent Albert Boutwell would be a good mayor and not just a dignified racist? Fred “made Black people uncomfortable,” Walker said, and discomfort was the point of this campaign. Walker had grown up in Merchantville, New Jersey, with a portrait of Frederick Douglass on the wall. What Douglass wrote still resonated with him: “It is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.” Damn right. Fred was not the problem. Black Birmingham was the problem. Segregation was the problem. As Walker put it: “See, it was the uncomfortableness that the presence of a Fred Shuttlesworth created. You have to understand how segregation is like a stain and it’s on everybody, and Fred represented the person who had the task of going around trying to wash the stain off.” They would succeed, Walker argued, when Black Birmingham started scrubbing, too.

Everything—Fred’s faith, his love, his courage—stemmed from a hope that he could be the change he wanted to see in the world. It was a preposterous idea in Birmingham, Alabama, but Fred Shuttlesworth was a preposterous man. He believed in his hope so much, he would ultimately be arrested more than thirty times for his activism and be named in more cases that reached the Supreme Court than any other person in American history. The perseverance it took to continue to hope was girded by a belief, something that ran through Fred’s head so often after that Christmas Day bombing it became a refrain for his life, and something he shared with the New Yorkers now. “You have to be prepared to die before you can begin to live.