Not a good idea dying simultaneously with Steve Jobs: Who is Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth?

An Elder Statesman for Civil Rights, dies at 89 on (October 6, 2011).  Was Rev. Fred L. Shuttleswort marching in King’s Shadow?

I was on Faceebook.com and read: “It is a shame that Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth death is going unnoticed after Steve Jobs departure”. I asked: “Who is Fred L. Shuttlesworth?”.  I received this link:

DIANE McWHORTER wrote (with slight editing, my style):

“IF you recognized the name of only one of the two greats who succumbed to cancer on Wednesday, that’s perhaps because the work of the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, who died at 89 in a hospital in Birmingham, Ala., was about as low-tech as it gets.

Using an operating system of unadorned bodily witness, backed by a headlong courage that often tested the grace of his God, Shuttlesworth was the key architect of the civil rights revolution’s turning-point victory in Birmingham, the mass marches of 1963. The internationally infamous climax, the showdown between the movement’s child demonstrators and the city of Birmingham’s fire hoses and police dogs, gave President John F. Kennedy the moral authority he needed to introduce legislation to abolish legal segregation, passed after his death as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (during President Johnson).

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the reluctant leader whom Shuttlesworth virtually goaded into joining him in Birmingham, got the credit — along with the Nobel Peace Prize — for their accomplishment. But that’s partly because Shuttlesworth was the un-King, the product not of polished Atlanta, but of rough, heavy-industrial Birmingham.

As the public face of the movement, King was its ambassador to the white world, while Mr. Shuttlesworth was the man in the trenches.

Without Shuttlesworth’s strategic acumen and troops, justice would have been dramatically delayed.  Shuttlesworth’s failure to get his due may be yet another example of the country’s reluctance to face up to the “class warfare”, which not only animates the current Occupy Wall Street demonstrations (yet another variation on the Birmingham template), but has long roiled the black community as well.

Among his movement colleagues, Shuttlesworth was known as the Wild Man from Birmingham. He had been a lonely pioneer of nonviolent direct action in the 1950s, dispatching his followers to illegal seats in the front of Birmingham’s buses, the day after the Ku Klux Klan bombed his bed out from under him on Christmas night in 1956.  Later, Shuttlesworth would say: “And this is where I was blown into history”)

He became increasingly frustrated trying to prod King, with whom he and two other black ministers founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, to fulfill their organization’s pledge to “redeem the soul of America.”

If King was Hamlet, not quite able to make up his mind and break away from the ceremonial demands of his role, Shuttlesworth sometimes resembled the Road Runner. Shuttlesworth said: “I literally tried to get myself killed”: He was involved in more bodily attacks, arrests, jail sentences and Supreme Court test cases than any other member of the S.C.L.C.

Shuttlesworth, born to young, unmarried parents and raised in hardship, had a long history of challenging not just white privilege, but the prejudices of what he called the “tea sippers” of his own race, who had shunned his largely working-class movement, until its success appeared inevitable, thanks to his efforts.

It was that experience that drove his often-tense relationship with King during the Birmingham protests. At one point, the S.C.L.C.’s “Atlanta crowd” had tried to call off the demonstrations, while Shuttlesworth was in the hospital recovering from injuries inflicted by one of the fire hoses of his equally determined nemesis, the arch-segregationist police commissioner Eugene (Bull) Connor.

Shuttlesworth, who readily acknowledged being a “cussing preacher,” used some hurtful profanity in letting King know what he thought of this capitulation — and overruled him, declaring the demonstrations back on.

When King traveled to Oslo the next year to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, won mainly because of the success in Birmingham, Shuttlesworth was not included in the sizable entourage that accompanied King. There is a sense that he was paying the price for being the first S.C.L.C. leader to buck King’s authority — with the added insult of being right.

Not surprisingly, the man forever being eased out of the limelight, had his own passing superseded within hours by the head-of-state mourning that greeted the death of Steven P. Jobs. Steve Jobs is being remembered as the “the man who invented our world,” in the words of one headline, celebrated for creating objects to which their owners relate as though they were human.

Shuttlesworth’s legacy reminds us of the not-so-distant era when the task of our heroes was to persuade society to regard as human a class of people who had long been treated as things.

A few years ago, after Mr. Shuttlesworth had survived a house fire, I teased him about his continuing record of close calls, saying that, even though the segregationists hadn’t done him in, somebody was going to get him one way or the other.  He replied: “Yeah, and when they do, God’s going to say, ‘They got a man.’ ” End of article.

Once, an officer approached  Shuttlesworth saying: “Reverend, I’ll tell you what I would do. I’d get outta town as quick as I could.”

Shuttlesworth responded: “Officer, you are not me. Tell your clan, if God saved me through all this, I am here for the duration. And the war is just beginning.”

I wonder: “Why President Obama cheated out his constituency from their rights?  Is proving to the White Elite Class that, by not diverging from their policies, he is giving the impression that high ranked Black leaders are for continuity, regardless of ignominy and indignity in the current political morass?