Rev. Shuttlesworth’s legacy

Rev. Shuttlesworth’s legacy

Cincinnati Enquirer: 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.

In Birmingham and Cincinnati, the eloquent Rev. Shuttlesworth appealed to moral conscience and championed everyday causes. Later in life he established the Shuttlesworth Housing Foundation to help low-income Cincinnatians afford a home.

He was focused, undeterrable, bold.

But instead of becoming a martyr, the Rev. Shuttlesworth lived to become one of the movement’s elder statesmen.