Read an Excerpt
A Fire You Can't Put Out
The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham's Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth
By Andrew M. Manis The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 1999 The University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-1345-6
CHAPTER 1
Alberta
There have been many times I wanted to try Mama, but one thing I know, Alberta didn't play. — Fred L. Shuttlesworth
According to an old southern story, a young boy once asked, "Daddy, what makes a lightning bug light?" Hoping not to appear stumped and thus preserve the mystique of parental omniscience, the father offered a long and purposely bewildering explanation. After several moments, the bemused lad cut through the verbiage, insisting, "C'mon, Daddy, for real. How come the lightning bug lights?" "Well, Son," the father sheepishly replied, "the stuff is just in him!" So one might say about Fred Shuttlesworth's spirited, confrontational personality. His character was a natural outgrowth of the situations and personalities around him. More than anyone else, however, his mother, Alberta Robinson Shuttlesworth, shaped Fred's resolute disposition. To recognize his mother's hard-bitten ways and the extent to which Fred adopted them is to understand how the "stuff" of his character got in him. This chapter covers Shuttlesworth's family background and early life up through his graduation from high school. It highlights how his upbringing in the shadow of the volatile and often violent relationship between his mother and stepfather shaped a combative personality that eventually expressed itself in all of Shuttlesworth's relationships. In particular, this part of the story details the ways the personality of his mother influenced that of her eldest child, preparing him in part for his later role as a hard-nosed minister and civil rights agitator.
Fred's determination and combativeness came naturally. Family and friends remembered Alberta's earthy piety and fabled strength of character. Eventually enfeebled, blind, and bedridden, she displayed an indomitable constitution by living to age ninety-four on the same hill where her nine children grew up. The civil rights preacher later called "a hard man for a hard town" shared this feistiness. Reminiscing about her father and grandmother, Patricia Shuttlesworth Massengill described an image that epitomized their spirited nature—Saturday night visits when both generations sat bobbing on a sofa, jabbing the air as they watched boxing matches on television. As Shuttlesworth's son, Fred Jr. further testified, "My old man don't kick butts no better than she do.... He looks like her; he talks like her. He has all of her mannerisms." Fred Sr.'s younger brother Clifton went one generation better by pointing to Alberta's father, March Robinson, as the source of this trait: "Fred ... just won't let nothin' stop him until he accomplishes what he started, and that's the way it was with my mother, and that's the way it was with my grandfather." The combative and at times earthy spirituality that marked the life of Fred Shuttlesworth thus persisted through generations on his mother's side of the family.
Born in the mid-1870s in Montgomery County, Alabama, March Robinson married Martha Carpenter just before the turn of the century in a small rural community known as McGhee Switch near the small town of Mt. Meigs. A devout Methodist, March became a steward and a trustee in the St. Matthew African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church after moving to the community near Birmingham known as Oxmoor. Both before and after his family's move, he earned a modest living as a tenant farmer, primarily raising corn and cotton. When fatigued from working the fields, he often asked his wife to sing "Amazing Grace" to him. He ordinarily owned livestock, especially chickens, a cow, and a very recalcitrant mule, which he sometimes beat with a chain. Although he had lost an eye in an accident, he was renowned as a sharpshooter with his twenty-two caliber rifle. He had very little formal schooling, although he had learned enough to read newspapers. He also prized education, and he insisted that his daughter get as much education as possible. One colorful family tale has him announcing his intention to avoid catching the measles, which had laid low most of the children. Declaring, "No, I'm not gon' catch those devilish things," he took up his blanket and slept in the barn. March and Martha, however, seldom used these sleeping arrangements, for they became the parents of eight children.
The first arrival, born August 25, 1900, was a daughter named Alberta, who became the apple of her father's protective eye. Later, the family remembered the affectionate and exaggerated manner by which March pronounced his daughter's name: "A-l-l-l-l-l-berta," with six syllables instead of three. Father and daughter were very close emotionally and lived near each other until March's death in 1945. As the first born, Alberta kept house for her parents while they worked the fields together, and as siblings arrived she participated in their rearing. She finished elementary school and took some courses at Alabama State Normal School (later called Alabama State College and still later Alabama State University), but never graduated. For a while she worked as a teacher's aide in the public schools, but by age twenty-one, circumstances ended her formal education and her opportunities for a teaching career.
She became involved with a young man named Vetter Greene, who had grown up in the area and developed a reputation for his easygoing manner. Greene lived in a dilapidated shack in an alley in Montgomery, making his meager living keeping dogs and repairing watches and guns. Although expert at his craft, he had neither much education nor any perceptible ambition to advance to any higher station in life. To March Robinson these traits marked him as less than suitable as a prospective son-in-law. Exhibiting a trait his daughter and grandson eventually shared, March aspired to a higher state for his children and took a dislike to young Greene. Although the couple was very much in love, March refused them permission to marry. Showing her own independence of mind, however, Alberta defied her father's wishes and continued the relationship. She became pregnant by Greene, and on March 18, 1922, gave birth to a son, whom she named Fred after a brother who had died some years earlier. Even after the arrival of an illegitimate son, and against her father's wishes, Alberta continued her relationship with Vetter Greene, becoming pregnant again in 1923. By this time, March Robinson had decided to move his large family, including the pregnant Alberta and her infant son, to the rapidly growing industrial county of Jefferson, ending Alberta's relationship with Vetter Greene.
Like thousands of other migrants settling in Jefferson County, March Robinson made the move for economic reasons. The city of Birmingham, founded in 1871 by railroad developers and land speculators of the Elyton Land Company and blessed with large deposits of coal, limestone, and iron ore, grew quickly into a New South industrial center. Through annexation in 1910, Birmingham grew into the third largest city in the former Confederacy. With a population of 132,685, it earned the nicknames the "Magic City" for its rapid growth and the "Pittsburgh of the South" for its importance as a steel producer. Combining the worst elements and excesses of both the Old South and the new, industry gradually created an atmosphere of exploitation in the city, especially for African Americans. In the 1920s, most new residents overlooked these matters, however, contenting themselves with the area's economic opportunities. Nonetheless, as the industry developed, exploitation of workers and poor working conditions in the mines kept pace with Birmingham's industrial reputation. The incomes of coal miners remained uncertain while their typical workdays lasted twelve to fourteen hours without overtime pay.
Even before Emancipation, the area, cursed with poor soil, had not been conducive to large plantations. Birmingham's community of freed slaves in the post-Emancipation era thus numbered only about twenty-five hundred. The developing industry of Jefferson County, however, attracted thousands of blacks from cotton farms downstate, most of whom were sharecroppers or tenant farmers like March Robinson. By 1880 the black population had doubled, and it increased by six times in the next decade. When the Robinsons arrived, they joined a black community of more than 130,000, which was 39 percent of the city's total population. This percentage of black residency marked the highest of any American city with more than one hundred thousand in population. As the number of African Americans grew between 1900 and 1920, whites pressed for the passage of legislation to control blacks' availability as cheap sources of labor. Most blacks became coal miners or steelworkers, relegated to menial and unskilled jobs. Other positions were deemed "white folks's jobs." Coal mines, requiring a great deal of heavy lifting and moving, employed blacks as virtual "beasts of burden." As in March Robinson's case, blacks were also hired to tend the animals that pulled the carts. In addition to working occasionally for the mines, Robinson rented a parcel of land in the former coalmining community called Oxmoor, ten miles south of Birmingham proper, near the Wenonah and Ishkooda Mines.
After the mines were depleted, the companies dismantled their smelting plants. By the 1930s, Birmingham industrialists had been hit hard by the depression and were remembering a saying from the city's earliest days: "Hard times come here first and stay longest." The dire situation portended even worse results for the city's black workers, who by this time comprised half the coal miners and 65 percent of the steelworkers in the state. Tighter competition resulted in a declining number of jobs for blacks as white workers and managers often colluded to wrest their positions from them. The mines' departure gradually ended the townlike amenities, reducing Oxmoor to two segregated communities four miles apart. While some blacks supported themselves by farming and by working in what remained of mining operations, others in Birmingham served as domestics, yardmen, and chauffeurs. According to historian Robert J. Norrell, patterns of industrial race relations in Birmingham matched those in South Africa, where job competition became a powerful incentive for maintaining segregation. This situation suggests one reason why by the 1960s the city had earned the name the "Johannesburg of the South." Prejudice and economic necessity thus forced blacks to accept lower-paying jobs outside heavy industry or to move to the North.
Blacks generally settled in the less attractive land left vacant by industry and by white residential areas, usually along creek beds or railroad lines. "Negro" sections such as Smithfield, Collegeville, and "Tuxedo Junction" remained unlighted, unpaved, and untouched by city services. The housing of most blacks barely improved on the ramshackle sharecropper cabins these migrants had left behind in their former rural districts. Many lived in rows of "company houses," three- to four-room rental dwellings owned by the coal and steel companies. Alberta lived with her family in such an arrangement in Oxmoor until she entered into a short-lived marriage to a man named Satterfield. The surroundings were less than commodious, and in later years her children often heard her remark about the old days on "Rat Row."
By the time her son turned five, Alberta had divorced Satterfield and had met William Nathan Shuttlesworth, reputed to be among the community's most eligible men. Born in Tuscaloosa County in 1877, Will Shuttlesworth was abandoned by his mother and reared by an aunt. Not much younger than March Robinson, he learned to read but acquired little education beyond the third grade. Sometime early in the century, Shuttlesworth migrated to Detroit to work in the automobile industry. He married a woman named Mayberry and raised two sons, Preston and Lawrence. After the marriage soured and the couple divorced, Will moved back to Alabama, settling in Oxmoor. He worked in the mines until silicosis, a disease of the lungs resulting from breathing ore dust, cost him his job. After retiring from the mines, Will supported himself by farming the three acres he had been able to buy with money he had earned in Detroit. Later, he also rented fifteen acres of land from another farmer near Edgewood Lake. On these parcels of land, Shuttlesworth primarily raised corn, which he used to feed his livestock and to distill liquor. His smalltime bootlegging operation continued until his death in 1940, but it never produced more than a weekly five-gallon barrel of liquor. He primarily served the miners who found their way to his operation after drawing their paychecks on weekends. This activity, coupled with his almost "religious" avoidance of churchgoing, made him as unlikely to win pious March Robinson's approval as Alberta's earlier suitors. Alberta asserted her will again, however, marrying Will Shuttlesworth on January 22, 1927. By this time, she had given birth to her second child by Vetter Greene, a girl named Cleola. Soon after the wedding Alberta changed the names of her children to Shuttlesworth. She later taught her children by Greene that "the man who takes care of you and brings you up is your father." Such a flexible view of paternity, in both the mother and her children, reflects an attitude typical among rural African Americans, who, in sociologist Lewis W. Jones's words, "accept the fact of having been born with a simplicity that more sophisticated people find difficult to appreciate." In this and other ways, Freddie Lee Shuttlesworth would grow up identifying with the common folk.
Alberta, Fred, and Cleo moved into the house that Will Shuttlesworth built with help from his friend, Morris Haygood. Eventually, the large house would be filled with seven other children from the union of Alberta and Will—Eugene, Eula Mae, Ernestine, Awilda, Clifton, Truzella, and Betty. In addition, the household often included the sons of Will's previous marriage, who came for extended visits. Photographs of Booker T. Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Jesus decorated the living room. These figures rarely became the objects of teaching sessions, although the parents as well as the children looked up to them as important parts of the black heritage. The Shuttlesworth home did not have running water or electric power; candles and kerosene lamps provided the illumination. The boys hauled water—drinking water from the well at the nearby schoolyard and wash water from a favorite spring—in two fifty-five gallon drums. This house, along with the red house where his grandmother Martha Robinson died, became the significant settings for Fred's first childhood memories.
Like most of the families in the community, the Shuttlesworths were poor. Fred was eleven or twelve before he acquired a pair of long pants. Wearing them proudly, Fred walked to school the next morning concerned that his creases not wrinkle. (This was apparently the beginning of his attention to his dapper appearance—later during his civil rights career, a relatively hostile Birmingham police officer would concede that "Shuttlesworth always looked good in his clothes.") Their poverty notwithstanding, the family managed by ingenuity and teamwork to avoid the most extreme forms of deprivation. Both parents, but especially Alberta, enforced their expectations that each of the children, as they grew old enough, would contribute to the family's well-being. Like many of their neighbors, the family benefited from the New Deal welfare programs and often expressed the popular slogan, "Let Roosevelt feed you and the good Lord lead you." At twelve Fred often rode his bicycle to the food distribution office on Second Avenue South and Twenty-fourth Street. His stepfather drove his Model-T Ford into Birmingham to buy day-old bread from a bakery. In addition, their diet consisted of beans, peas, greens of various sorts, welfare flour, wheat, and lard, with occasional opportunities for meat.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Fire You Can't Put Out by Andrew M. Manis. Copyright © 1999 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
