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Showing posts with the label Fred Shuttlesworth

President Remarks On Passing of Civil Rights Icon

Civil Rights icon Fred Lee Shuttlesworth passed today. He was reveered as one of the most relentless figures of the Civil Rights Movement  having established the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) 1956. In December of that year, the United States Supreme Court ruled that bus segregation in Montgomery, Alabama, was illegal. Shuttlesworth, immediately announced that the ACMHR was going to test segregation laws in Birmingham. On Christmas night the Shuttlesworth house was blown up by sixteen sticks of Ku Klux Klan dynamite. Shuttlesworth, who landed in the basement and whose bedroom was blown apart, and visiting Deacon Charles Robinson were unharmed. Shuttlesworth, then, led a rally the very next day. He was beaten by police in 1957 for trying to enroll his daughter in an all white school and that same year joined with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph David Abernathy, and Bayard Rustin to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference...