Civil rights pioneer from Ohio hospitalized after mild stroke

CINCINNATI (AP) — The Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, a civil rights pioneer, has been hospitalized after suffering a mild stroke.

University Hospital released a brief statement Friday that Shuttlesworth was being treated in intensive care and was in fair condition.

“He’s improving, he’s responding,” Ruby Bester, one of Shuttlesworth’s four children, said Friday. “God has been good to him.”

Shuttlesworth, 85, was hospitalized Wednesday. The length of his hospital stay has not been determined, his daughter said.

He canceled a planned weekend trip to Birmingham, Ala., where he was a leader in the fight against racial segregation in the 1950s and worked with the late Martin Luther King Jr. in the civil rights cause.

Shuttlesworth, beaten by a mob and whose house in Birmingham was bombed, has lived in Cincinnati since 1961. He had a benign brain tumor removed in August 2005, and retired as pastor of the Greater New Light Baptist Church in 2006.