Birmingham became the center of the civil rights movement in spring 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr. and his supporters in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference arrived with a plan they called “Project C”—for confrontation. At that point, blacks were forced to attend ...read more
Four days earlier, on April 12, King and nearly 50 other protestors and civil rights leaders (including Ralph Abernathy and Fred Shuttlesworth) had been arrested after leading a Good Friday demonstration as part of the Birmingham Campaign, designed to bring national attention to ...read more
Born Freddie Lee Robinson in rural Mount Meigs, Alabama, Fred Shuttlesworth worked as a sharecropper, bootlegger and truck driver before entering the ministry and becoming pastor of Birmingham’s Bethel Baptist Church in 1953. Three years later, after the National Association for ...read more