[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 149 (Thursday, October 6, 2011)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6320-S6321]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
TRIBUTE TO REVEREND FRED SHUTTLESWORTH
Mr. BROWN of Ohio. Mr. President, I rise today to honor Rev. Fred Lee
Shuttlesworth, an American civil rights hero who lived much of his
adult life in Cincinnati who passed away this week at the age of 89. I
come to the floor in support of a resolution with Senator Portman, my
colleague from Cincinnati, where Reverend Shuttlesworth lived for many
years, and also from Senator Shelby and Senator Sessions, both
representing Alabama, where Reverend Shuttlesworth lived his earliest
several decades and then the end of his life.
Much is known about his life--the beatings, the bombings, the arrests
and protests. He was born in 1922 in Alabama. He was a truckdriver who
studied theology at night. He became an ordained minister in his
twenties. By the 1950s, in his thirties, he was the pastor of Bethel
Baptist Church in Birmingham, the pulpit from which he became the
powerful, fiery, outspoken leader against racial discrimination and
injustice.
When the Alabama NAACP was banned in the State, Reverend
Shuttlesworth established the Alabama Christian Movement for Human
Rights. Churches held weekly meetings, membership grew month by month--
in large part because of Reverend Shuttlesworth's leadership skills--
and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights became the mass
movement for Blacks in the South.
He fought Birmingham's racism in the courtroom, bringing suits to
desegregate public recreation facilities. He protested segregation of
buses in Birmingham. He was beaten with chains and brass knuckles when
he tried to enroll his children in a Birmingham school, even though he
was, of course, a taxpayer. He would lead Freedom Riders to safety--a
critical voice imploring Attorney General Robert Kennedy and President
John F. Kennedy to get the Federal Government to show leadership as
Freedom Riders were jailed and attacked. Reverend Shuttlesworth was
often jailed and later left bruised and bloodied from firehoses and
police dogs, the brutal force of Bull Connor's lynch mob. His life and
his family were threatened by Connor's ignorant hostility--or
indifference more often than hostility.
His words:
They would call me SOB, and they didn't mean ``sweet old
boy. . . . '' [T]he first time I saw brass knuckles was when
they struck me . . . they missed me with dynamite because God
made me dynamite.
So his direct action campaigned continued. He mobilized students to
boycott merchants with Jim Crow signs in their storefronts. He worked
and he marched with Dr. King, affiliating the Alabama Christian
Movement for Human Rights with the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference, organizing bus boycotts and sit-ins and marches and acts of
civil disobedience. He persuaded Dr. King to bring the civil rights
movement to Birmingham, where Dr. King would write his famous ``Letter
from a Birmingham Jail.'' In the letter, Dr. King writes of the
necessity of Reverend Shuttlesworth's direct action campaign, fighting
``broken promises'' and ``blasted hopes.'' The two words ``broken'' and
``blasted'' meant so much to them personally because both were attacked
so frequently.
In September 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed,
murdering four little girls, and the movement's grief and responsive
resiliency helped pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The next year, he helped organize the historic march from Selma to
Montgomery, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, to fight voting
discrimination in Alabama and across the South, galvanizing meeting
after meeting with his fiery words. He soon arrived in Cincinnati,
coming across the Ohio River, as pastor of the Greater New Light
Baptist Church in Avondale.
He trained Freedom Riders in nearby Oxford, OH, at the Western Campus
for Women then, now affiliated or absorbed by Miami of Ohio, one of our
great State universities. He trained those Freedom Riders, thousands of
activists who would travel south to register Black voters.
Reverend Shuttlesworth fought for racial equality in Cincinnati
schools, in city councils and police departments, empowering low-income
families through education, jobs, and housing for decades to come.
I would like to read from and ask unanimous consent to have printed
in the Record the editorial from the Cincinnati Inquirer from October
5, 2011.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
(See exhibit 1.)
Mr. BROWN of Ohio. I would like to share a couple of words from the
Cincinnati Inquirer. This is the beautifully written Cincinnati
Inquirer editorial about Reverend Shuttlesworth:
He once told the Tampa Tribune it helped to have a ``little
divine insanity--that's when you're willing to suffer and die
for something.''
[[Page S6321]]
They also wrote:
Perhaps nowhere is his ultimate triumph more evident than
in the renaming of the Birmingham airport to the Birmingham-
Shuttlesworth International Airport--a public tribute in a
city where once a Ku Klux Klan member who was a police
officer warned him to get out of town as fast as he could.
Needless to say, the airport was named after Reverend Shuttlesworth,
not after the KKK police officer.
It was an honor to get to know Reverend Shuttlesworth and to learn
from him. In 1998, I first met this historic figure of the civil rights
movement--unknown to far too many people--in Selma, AL, during a
pilgrimage with Congressman John Lewis, who was beaten perhaps more
than anybody in the civil rights movement. It was an opportunity to
spend some time with Reverend Shuttlesworth in Selma in the late 1990s.
I visited his church in 2006. I heard him preach, and then, at his
retirement party a while after that--not too many years ago--I heard
him preach again and got the chance to get a tour at his retirement
party, a tour of the small museum in his modest church celebrating his
life but more set up to honor and commemorate the civil rights movement
in the most personal kind of way. It is impossible for me to really
describe the feelings I had as he talked to a small group--Connie, my
wife, and me--a small group of us as we toured this very small museum
in a room at the church. It was just packed with all kinds of mementoes
and commemorations of the civil rights movement and Reverend
Shuttlesworth's fight in those days in Alabama. From those pictures and
his memory, you learn not just about a man's life but about our
Nation's history.
The passage of the most basic civil rights laws would not have
occurred without his vision and fortitude. We honor his legacy in his
passing, but we are also charged with upholding a sacred duty to take
his lead, and that is because progress in our Nation is never easy.
Passage of voting rights or civil rights was not the result of one
man's great speech in Washington or one famous march across the Edmund
Pettus Bridge.
Exhibit 1
Shuttlesworth `Truly a Man of Courage, Conviction and Integrity'
Cincinnati Enquirer Editorial, Oct. 5, 2011
In 1955, the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth was a young pastor in
Birmingham, Ala., preaching sermons on equality and working
in his segregated city on the issues before him, such as
adding street lights to African-American neighborhoods.
But after he petitioned the Birmingham City Council to hire
African-American police officers, a larger calling took hold
of him.
He saw his role as helping to lift African Americans--and
the rest of his countrymen--from another sort of darkness:
that of racial bigotry.
He became a restless, outspoken advocate for integration, a
co-founder of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human
Rights, and a leader of the Civil Rights movement.
His death Wednesday in Birmingham left a sense of national
loss, strongly felt in Cincinnati, where he spent most of his
adulthood and served as pastor of two churches.
We feel that sense of loss, recognize the depth of his
accomplishment and give thanks for the example he set.
In Birmingham and Cincinnati, the eloquent Rev.
Shuttlesworth appealed to moral conscience and championed
everyday causes. He sat at lunch counters with young
protesters in Birmingham, held ``wade-ins'' at segregated
beaches in St. Augustine, Fla., and later in life established
the Shuttlesworth Housing Foundation to help low-income
Cincinnatians afford a home.
He was focused, undeterrable, bold. He challenged
Birmingham's white power structure at every turn. He refused
to flinch at bombings of his church and home. He urged civil
rights leaders to be more assertive, labeling the 1963
campaign to desegregate Birmingham ``Project C''--for
confrontational.
He once told the Tampa Tribune it helped to have ``a little
divine insanity--that's when you're willing to suffer and die
for something.''
But instead of becoming a martyr, the Rev. Shuttlesworth
lived to become one of the movement's elder statesmen.
The sound of his name alone revived memories of Freedom
Riders and police fire hoses, of the relentless drive of
young civil rights leaders and the stubborn resistance of the
Old South. Perhaps nowhere is his ultimate triumph more
evident than in the renaming of the Birmingham airport to the
Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport--a public
tribute in a city where once a Ku Klux Klan member who was
also a police officer warned him to get out of town as fast
as he could.
He replied that he didn't run. And, in Birmingham and
Cincinnati, he never did. And he never stopped.
As the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote to him, ``May
God strengthen your spirit and uplift your heart that even
your accusers will be forced to admit that truly you are a
man of courage, conviction and integrity.''
Mr. BROWN of Ohio. The fight for women's rights and fair pay and
protections for the disabled, none of those fights were easy, yet in
the last few years, we celebrated the 90th anniversary of the 19th
amendment, the 75th anniversary of Social Security, the 45th
anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, the 20th anniversary of the
Americans with Disabilities Act.
What have we done here this year? How will we show the march toward
justice is the mark of our Nation's progress? We do so by marching with
his spirit rather than standing in his shadow.
Dr. King said of Reverend Shuttlesworth, he ``proved to his people
that he would not ask anyone to go where he was not willing to lead.''
That is a testament to his courage.
Four years ago, then a candidate for President, Senator Obama
escorted a wheelchair-bound Reverend Shuttlesworth across the Edmund
Pettus Bridge in Selma. It was symbolic. It showed yet again Reverend
Shuttlesworth leading us across another bridge.
On behalf of a grateful State, Ohio, and in partnership with Senator
Portman from Ohio, Senator Shelby from Alabama, and Senator Sessions
from Alabama, I offer my deepest condolences to the Shuttlesworth
family and to all of his friends and to all of his loved ones.
Mr. President, I will offer this resolution, and I think we will be
looking at it later today, offered by Senators Portman, Sessions,
Shelby, and myself. I will ask for passage later.
____________________