Fred Shuttlesworth

The Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth was president of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (Walker v. City of Birmingham, 388 U.S. 307 (1967), Douglas, dissenting, paragraph 60), the Birmingham, Alabama affiliate of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which asked Martin Luther King Jr and his staff to come to the city (King, Letter from Birmingham Jail p. 1). King’s letter from the jail recalls that Shuttlesworth and the movement’s leaders had agreed, after talks the previous September, to suspend demonstrations when the city’s merchants promised to take down their racial signs, and that the promise was broken (King, Letter from Birmingham Jail p. 2).

In April 1963 he sent a member of the movement to city hall to ask about a permit to demonstrate, and then asked for one himself by telegram. Commissioner Eugene Connor refused the first request and answered the second by insisting that no picketing begin (Walker v. City of Birmingham, 388 U.S. 307 (1967), Brennan, dissenting, paragraphs 71–73). On Good Friday, 12 April, he led the march with King and Ralph Abernathy and was jailed with them (Walker v. City of Birmingham, 388 U.S. 307 (1967), Brennan, dissenting, paragraph 77). For that march he was sentenced to 90 days at hard labour for parading without a permit, a conviction the Supreme Court of the United States reversed in 1969 (Shuttlesworth v. City of Birmingham, 394 U.S. 147 (1969), paragraphs 2–7 and judgment). See the Churches and the Civil Rights Movement.