Described in a 1961 CBS documentary as "the man most feared by Southern racists," Shuttlesworth survived bombings, beatings, repeated jailings and other attacks physical and financial in his unyielding determination to heal the country's most enduring, divisive and volatile chasm.
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Although not as well known as King and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy his compatriots in the civil rights movement's "Big Three" Shuttlesworth brought the struggle into the living rooms of white America through a series of combustible showdowns with the Ku Klux Klan, Southern segregationists and Birmingham's infamous commissioner of public safety, Eugene "Bull" Connor.
"A guest at Bull's house" more commonly known as the Birmingham jail on more than two dozen occasions, Shuttlesworth was viewed by King himself as the person who, because of his confrontational boldness and willingness to put himself in harm's way, was likely to become the movement's first major martyr.
"We're determined to either kill segregation or be killed by it," Shuttlesworth said in the 1961 CBS program. To achieve the goal, he nearly suffered the consequence, coming close to proving King's premonition true through numerous narrow escapes from death during the civil rights movement's most volatile and dangerous years.
He survived two bombings, one on Christmas Day 1956 when dynamite tossed from a passing car destroyed his parsonage beside Bethel Baptist Church, a small, narrow red-brick structure where he helped ignite "a fire you can't put out" that forever changed life not just in Birmingham and Alabama, but America.
Nine months later, he was savagely beaten by a white mob armed with bicycle chains and baseball bats in September 1957 when he tried to enroll his daughters at segregated Phillips High School. His wife also was stabbed and his daughter Ruby had her ankle crushed in their car door in that horrific attack.
