- We said turn the Negro loose and America will be free.

We're going to march.

we're going to walk together.

We're going to stand together.

We're going to sing together.

We're going to stay together.

We're going to moan together.

We're going to groan together.

And after a while, we'll shout, "Freedom!

Freedom!

Freedom Now"!

- Fred Shuttlesworth was sort of the un-Martin Luther King.

Not exactly, not the anti-King, but the un-King.

- I wanna call him a warrior.

Someone who just really just stepped up to the cause, whatever the cause may have been.

- He truly risked his life to fight for change.

- It wasn't just about segregation, but it was about segregation.

Anywhere that he saw inequality, he confronted it.

- He is upfront.

He is not sending people into battle.

He is leading people into battle.

It was what we need to get the job done.

- His idea of fighting segregation was to fight segregation on all fronts.

- He was totally unafraid of Bull Connor, the most violent, racist symbol in Alabama.

- Birmingham was so tough, you just almost had to have an absolutist to deal with it.

- We had to say to the public and to the world, we are against segregation, with no compromise.

- When I first met Fred, I thought, 'wow, (laughs) this is the one tough dude'.

- When he tried to enroll his children at Phillips High School, he was badly beaten, his wife was stabbed in the leg.

- Admitted to the hospital, back out, fighting again.

Home got bombed, back out, fighting again.

- Some folks said Fred was crazy.

He had so much courage.

He could take beatings.

They took his car, they took, they did everything to Fred, he never stopped.

- We needed someone in Birmingham who wasn't afraid.

And we found that man in Fred Shuttlesworth.

- You got to walk for freedom.

You got to talk for freedom.

You got to sing for freedom.

You got to think for freedom.

You got to pray for freedom.

You got to work together for freedom.

You gotta walk together children, and don't get worried... (crowd cheers drowning out Shuttlesworth) - Birmingham's initial claim to fame was that it was said to be the only locale in the universe where the three main ingredients of iron-making existed in one place.

It was just all about converting minerals into cash.

- The city economy really takes off.

A lot of people come here.

The population grows very rapidly.

- The profits were really based, right away on this sort of two-class system of labor.

- US Steel saw the value of pitting black and white workers against each other.

Because if you kept black wages significantly lower, then the white wages would never have to rise.

- It also saved the industrialists from having to modernize their plants.

So, you know, they had these antiquated factories with black workers doing the worst, the lowliest of the low work.

- 50 cents an hour working with that steel like that.

And the man that worked with him, if he's white, he may be getting 75 cent.

It just kept a tug all the time.

I got sick of it.

That's right, you get sick of that.

- Segregation was so solidly in the minds and the psyche that nobody's supposed to tamper with it.

- The rules are being made for Jim Crow by the force of the company having that kind of power.

And that was consistent with white control.

- And the laws were created to supply labor for the iron-makers.

- But the leading people in this city was segregationists.

And all the whites were together that the Negro should be kept in his place.

- Bull Connor, who we know as the sort of, you know, cartoon racist villain of the civil rights movement was actually installed during the New Deal as sort of an anti-union, anti-New Deal mascot.

He had been a very popular baseball announcer from Dallas County and spoke in the country vernacular.

And Bull became, just wildly popular.

- And so it was under Connor, in particular, the police who stepped into this role of keeping blacks in their place and enforcing the law in such a way to intimidate blacks.

- My father worked two jobs, and I remember him telling my mother, 'they took the light bill money'.

And I thought, 'who took it'?

And it was revealed later it was the police.

- It's sort of a police state supporting the industries.

Bull Connor became the political intermediary between the corporate interests and the Klan, so that the corporations could be hands-off and keep their hands clean.

- Anytime that there was a little bit of movement toward accommodation for blacks, there was a tremendous amount of pushback.

I was trying to get a job at a neighborhood store to deliver groceries to some of their customers.

I was excited, happy.

I'm 11 or 12 years old.

I knocked on her door, she opened the door, she cussed me out and called me nigger.

Don't ever come to her front door again.

Go round to her back now.

And it was terrible.

It's an experience I've never forgotten and I was only 11, 12 years old.

- Birmingham got its nickname of Bombingham starting in around 1947.

There was almost no housing stock for upwardly mobile African Americans.

So, when the first African Americans start building houses on the, even on the black zoned side of the street, that was too close to the whites.

- If a black person had made a deposit on a house on the wrong side of Center Street, you could expect that house to be burned or bombed or somehow or other vandalized.

- A lot of these folks were upstanding, AME Bishop and, you know, business folks.

Every time they would win the right to live in their own house they had bought, it would be dynamited.

- Why isn't the sale and use of dynamite strictly restricted and supervised by officials?

And if it is then why is it so easy for certain elements and certain groups to obtain and use it?

- Dynamite was used to blast coal from the coal mines.

Asking how these guys know how to use dynamite or make a bomb is like asking a farmer how he knows how to drive a tractor.

You know, it's just in them.

- At Arthur Shores' house, the scariest moment on the first bomb, and after hearing such a horrific blast, there must have been 300 people down there in that intersection.

The cop pulled his police car up in the middle of the intersection and pulled that shotgun out of there and blew that light out.

The next blasts that he shot were over our heads, but we scattered because we thought we were getting ready to be killed.

That was a terrifying moment for this entire Smithfield community.

We knew then.

No question.

That the police were the enemy.

- When we talk about most segregated city, it was like nothing is gonna change.

You know, we're gonna keep it just the way it is and maybe even make it a little tougher.

- Now let me tell you something, you know as well as I, - Now let me tell you something, you know as well as I, you hire a policeman, that foots in that door.

what they going to come back next?

Mayor, I want you to get you a nigger stenographer.

- The next experiences were seeing the police cars out in front of our home and noticing those colorful Klan robes on the back shelf of the police car.

- You wake up in the morning, the Lord gets you up in the morning, and it's always the same old thing over and over again.

Parade and right there in Smithfield, the Klan walk around parading with the police cars leading the procession.

- You know, Dr. King said that the real tragedy in old Birmingham is not the bad folk in Birmingham, but the silence of the good people.

- That's why we had the struggle.

40%, we were 40% of Birmingham's population with exactly 0% of the privileges.

That's unfair any way you take it.

- Fred Shuttlesworth was a child of hardscrabble, industrial Birmingham.

He had been born to young, unwed parents in a rural community outside of Montgomery.

- He was, in some sense, acting like a father figure to the rest of his siblings, eight of them.

- His mother had married a much older man and moved to the outskirts of Birmingham.

Shuttlesworth took his name, somewhat begrudgingly, William Shuttlesworth, because he was an abusive father and husband.

He had worked in the ore mines doing, you know, difficult labor that African Americans were assigned to.

And he was on relief in the thirties, you know, when Shuttlesworth was coming up, and at one point during a fight with Shuttlesworth's mother, he put her eye out with a broomstick.

It was just, it was a fairly brutal household.

- And when Alberta was busy somehow, she assigned Fred the role of being the enforcer.

And he was the enforcer.

- He was a very authoritative, if not authoritarian, person.

- But he said he felt like that he was being prepared for something greater.

And as a child, he didn't know what that meant.

He said that other people saw it too, though.

He said that his teachers and folks at church, oftentimes they'd say, 'boy, I see something in you'.

- I think what happened, and the example of his mother, I think he learned his persistence from her and his tendency never to give up.

- He said he knew by the time he was 22, 23 years old, that he would be a preacher.

He thought he would be a doctor or a minister.

- God got him ready for Collegeville after he pastored First Baptist Church in Selma.

It was one of those situations where there was always contention between the pastor and the deacons.

So he said, you know, he had to really and truly fight hard.

- When he came to Birmingham in 1952, he did a good bit of social ministry or social gospel ministry, for that matter.

- People who were dealing with the environmental racism of the byproducts plants and the heavy metals and the air pollution that had penetrated in the soil.

Fred was conversant with all of those kinds of issues.

He was caring about those kinds of people.

- You know, they would work with city government to try to get streetlights in the black neighborhoods.

Because, you know, the black neighborhoods were just neglected, even though they paid taxes like everybody else.

- His congregation had a handful of black middle class members, but most were working class.

- He said it was a movement of the masses and not the classes.

Others thought that he was maybe too radical.

But the people who lived in this neighborhood, people who lived in similar neighborhoods like this across Jefferson County, they supported him 100%.

That they were working toward the future.

- Fred was eager to get involved in the Birmingham chapter of NAACP.

He got involved quickly trying to clean up saloons.

- It seems that every weekend something happened at the juke joint and what happened there invariably impacted the community.

So he went to the police department and asked for help.

And they just literally laughed him to scorn.

And then, because of the way he was treated by law enforcement, feeling that he had to more or less take matters into his own hand, things began to happen more and more in that same light as it relates to human and civil rights in this community.

- He started the movement.

He began to stand up over there in Collegeville, at that Bethel Baptist Church, standing up against stuff by hisself.

So God had already seasoned him and got him ready.

- But when he actually got involved, beyond the juke joints, he actually talked to the congregation about it.

They realized that if he was going to be successful, if this really was gonna work, it was gonna change things.

- I couldn't hardly believe it, but I was so thrilled.

We were going to get something going about gaining better quality for ourselves, okay?

'Cause nobody was going to give it to us, ever.

There were many promises made, but they were never lived up to, okay?

- There came a time when he started to think about, you know, the differences between, you know, the whites and the blacks and the community and the power structure.

But what he understood even better than that was what it was gonna take to bring about real change.

And that was to become part of the process.

And so he started challenging people to vote, to get registered to vote.

- He knew God's will when he heard it, and he would, he was certain that he was following it.

When the Brown decision was handed down by the Supreme Court, he says the next day he saw the headline and he said it felt like another conversion.

- And then the attorney general outlawed the NAACP in 1956.

- I was a member of the NAACP.

And it had been discussed, and we believed, that nobody can stop the church.

The name came up of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights.

- The state had a loophole.

And the loophole, more or less stated that, religious organizations and literary organizations did not have to reveal who their members were.

- We're going to be legal, we're going to negotiate, but we're going to have direct action.

We going to picket when necessary, we're going to demonstrate, when necessary.

So that's the difference in ACMHR and NAACP.

And this is the way he led it.

He had a strategy.

- Kind of ironically, in a way, the failure of the elite in Birmingham to actually manage race relations in such a way is to kind of keep the black community engaged.

All the moderates are sidelined and it allows space for Fred Shuttlesworth to emerge.

- The Supreme Court gave the Montgomery boycott a victory by saying that segregation of seating on buses in Montgomery was unconstitutional.

And Shuttlesworth, of course, his thinking was, if segregated seating is unconstitutional in Montgomery, it must be unconstitutional in Birmingham, just a hundred miles away.

- During that time, we had to get up and give white folk seat, even if we paid the money.

Why I ain't just talking about white women.

I mean white men, anybody.

- And Shuttlesworth decided that if Birmingham didn't voluntarily desegregate its buses, that he was going to ride on the front of the buses and protest.

- Fred announced to the press that if they didn't do that by Christmas day, 'my followers and I will board the buses and we will sit, regardless of whether it's in the front or the back'.

- So then we let the press have it.

And this is how Birmingham at that time, it is something to have lived here and to live through what I lived in.

Reverend F.L.

Shuttlesworth, 3191 North 29th Avenue, has called a mass meeting.

That's telling the Klan where to put the bomb, you know.

(suspenseful music) - It was Christmas.

We had Christmas dinner, of course, and we were happy.

We had Christmas dinner, of course, and we were happy.

That's where you got things.

I don't remember what I got.

- Christmas Day and I had gotten a red football outfit and I thought I was one of Paul Bryant's boys.

- And I had thrown one of my shoes over towards the presents and was hopping on one foot towards the presents, which I must have been told, stay away from'em, or what have you.

And the bomb went off.

And that's my memory of that night.

- So, I just felt a slight push, jar.

I heard this terrific roar of dynamite.

But the thing, I guess, that was on my mind was, which was more important than anything else.

The fact that God was there.

- According to the FBI, a bomb of 16 sticks of dynamite was placed up under the area of the house where the bedroom was.

And the house was just blown up.

Totally just caved in.

- The Klan had written my name on the dynamite, but God's grace erased my name to the extent that I didn't even get a scratch of no kind.

- He didn't have any doubt about that.

You know, people don't get saved from the middle of bombs unless God wants them to be saved for some purpose.

- He said, when that bomb went off, he started to quote the 27th number of Psalms, 'The Lord is my light and my salvation.

Whom shall I fear'?

And so as a result, he said, after that night, he was never afraid anymore.

- I've always believed, completely and totally, that God would take care of me.

- Teenage member of the church who had been baptized by Fred Shuttlesworth told me that if we had seen Jesus walk on water, we wouldn't have been any more reverent than we were when we saw Fred come out of that building alive.

Fred Shuttlesworth was not only their man, but God's man.

- But the bombing changed hearts and minds.

After having gone through that the night before, he still got out and did it.

- So the next morning, just as promised, since the bus company had not changed its seating policy, Fred did what he said.

There were 22 arrests.

- So in 1954, the Brown v Board case, 1955, 1956 schools are still segregated in Alabama.

- In 1957, Reverend Shuttlesworth and Dwight Armstrong and several others filed a lawsuit in federal court to desegregate the Birmingham public schools.

The presiding judge, Judge Hobart Grooms, had a habit of just sitting on civil rights cases and not making a ruling.

So, Fred Shuttlesworth took the matter into his own hands.

- Reverend Shuttlesworth, still based on Brown and what the Supreme Court, you know, their decision, takes his two daughters, Pat and Ruby, and a young man from the church.

And the goal is to integrate Phillips High School.

- As they drive up, Shuttlesworth could tell that this was not gonna be pretty.

And he gets out of the car, and he's gonna try to walk through this group of thugs.

- He tells his family to stay inside and he gets out.

- When we pulled up, I thought to myself, 'Lord, have mercy'.

And they immediately attacked him.

Lots of shouting and cursing.

- Everything started with the B.

Baseball bats, brass knuckles and bicycle chains.

- And as he is being beaten, his wife, Ruby, gets out and she's trying all she can to help him.

Well Ruby is stabbed in the hip.

- Ricky Shuttlesworth has gotten out of the car to try to help, and then her mother ordering her to get back in the car.

But she didn't do it fast enough because somebody slammed the door and caught her ankle in the door.

- He's badly beaten.

His arm is in a sling.

His, the skin on his fingers has all been scraped off.

I mean, it was just horrible what happened to him.

- They get to the hospital and, after a while they see the doctor, the doctor is treating his wounds.

He comes in and he tells them, I can't believe you don't even have a concussion.

And Shuttlesworth says, with a smile, 'well, doc, the Lord knew I lived in a hard town, so he gave me a hard head'.

- And then he will end up going to a meeting.

And the crowd that night, they are furious.

Everybody wants to come and just tear the city apart.

But being the leader that he was, he calmed the crowd down.

He said, 'now, which one of you got beaten today?

Which one of you had to go to the hospital'?

Nobody could say anything.

So, he says that, 'if I'm the only one who's beaten, and if I'm not angry, if I'm not trying to tear things apart, neither can you'.

And I just love what he said.

- Shuttlesworth was litigating, he was filing suits on desegregation of parks, equal employment, schools.

So he was leading in Birmingham, courageously, a movement.

- Reverend Shuttlesworth was the contact person in Birmingham, and I think Alabama, for the Freedom Riders.

There were two buses of students, black and white, on the Greyhound bus, and they were also on a Continental Trailway bus.

And the Greyhound bus is the one that was fire-bombed in Anniston.

The other bus, the Trailways bus, had no idea of what had happened outside of Anniston.

And they're still making their way to Birmingham.

- Bull Connor, he said that they would have 15 minutes to do their work before the police showed up.

- At Birmingham there was another attack on the Freedom Riders.

Their contact person in Birmingham was Shuttlesworth.

And they all, like individually, found their way to Bethel Baptist Church out in Collegeville.

Get to a place where they would be protected.

- The Klan managed to take most of the footage that was taken of the scene, except one local photographer had his camera smashed.

But the film was still there when he went back to get it.

Goes out internationally.

One of the city fathers, who had been one of the art segregationists in town, his name was Sidney Smyer, happened to be at an International Rotary Club meeting in Tokyo.

It was the first time he had seen his city through the eyes of the civilized international community.

And he had this change of heart.

You know, he was the largest real estate developer in town, big in the Chamber of Commerce.

So when he got back, he decided to form a committee, to look into what they could do about Bull Connor.

- They finally decided that from all of their meetings, they would come up with a document called, "A Statement of the Concerns of Birmingham Black Community".

They asked me to write it up.

I wrote that around '62 that we're talking about now.

And they came back and the message from the white business community group was, 'Fine, they were willing to meet.

Yes, they will meet'.

- They invite Shuttlesworth into one meeting and he's really rather disgusted that it's taken so long for these proud white Birminghamians to, you know, get involved and try to solve these problems.

- A lot of people complained about, I heard a lot of complaints from the committee members and so forth about Fred.

The business community didn't wanna meet with Fred.

They tried to find ways to get around meeting with Fred.

- Fred, being one of the founding members of SCLC in '57.

He told Dr. King, 'look Martin, I've got the people.

You got the strategies and you're talking all of this, but I've got the people together already in Birmingham'.

- They actually had the SCLC meeting in Birmingham in 1962.

- Shuttlesworth is requesting, cajoling, insisting, pestering, come to Birmingham.

We'll rock the country when we desegregate Birmingham.

- Fred said, you need to come to Birmingham.

And if we can defeat Bull Connor in Birmingham, we'll make a name for SCLC.

We'll make a change in this country.

And the fact that King agreed is, I think, a tribute to the fact that Fred was so persistent.

And he was right.

That's when they started planning Project C. - It meant confrontation.

And it included the strategy for attacking segregation.

So it included sit-ins, demonstrations, protests of all kind, you know, that was the word that covered all of the activities related to the demonstrations at that time.

- King needed a victory enough that he was willing to come to Birmingham.

Wyatt Walker said nobody wanted to go to Birmingham, you know, it was named Bombingham for a reason.

And people got killed in Birmingham.

- Shuttlesworth were pretty much turned the planning over to Wyatt Tee Walker, who was King's chief of staff.

He really, you know, did incredible fundraising, professionalized the whole operation.

- So we've got King in Birmingham, we've got Abernathy, we've got SCLC.

But this is Reverend Shuttlesworth's town.

So therefore, nothing is going forward, nothing is going on that he is not a part of.

- Birmingham was chosen for a place of conflict.

It was chosen because of the personality of Bull Connor.

And, perhaps the personality of Fred Shuttlesworth as well.

And so having those two strong personalities and then injecting Martin, you had all of the blueprint for a major conflict for human rights.

- Some went to JJ Newberry, some went to Kress', and the group I was with went to Lane Drugstore.

They just pulled everything off of the table, and we remained seated.

'Cause the purpose was to get arrested.

- I remember during the demonstrations, I mean, I'd wake up in the morning wondering whether I would end up dead somewhere or in jail, end of the day.

And, it could well have happened.

- I never slept so well.

Just on a hard bed, just, I never slept so well because we were going to be better the next day than we were today.

You see, there was some hope.

- The strategy is always to fill the jails until the jails would be overflowing to capacity.

- People who participated in everything, no matter what Shuttlesworth did or said, they were always there.

But they were looking for the community, as a whole, to kind of just swell all the big churches, just people by the thousands.

But they really didn't come.

- The sit-ins were not developing, you know, dramatic confrontations.

And so they upped the ante by switching to these marches.

- The first big march, Shuttlesworth and another one of his lieutenants led it.

And they're marching, and then Bull Connor says something like, 'I'm hungry.

Time for lunch.

Bring on the wagons'.

The demonstrators just get to their knees immediately.

They start praying.

Shuttlesworth asks the Lord to bless the city, and then they take them to jail.

- Shuttlesworth's motto, when it came to this was, he didn't believe in asking anybody to do anything that he wouldn't do himself.

There was an injunction from Judge WA Jenkins.

Martin did not like to violate court injunction.

He didn't like to go to jail either.

There's a big confab at the Gaston Motel.

- We cannot, in all good conscience, obey such an injunction, which is an unjust, undemocratic and unconstitutional misuse of the legal process.

- Shuttlesworth had brought them some Dungarees to put on and a denim shirt because, you know, go in to change clothes, we're gonna start the demonstrations.

And so when King walks out, almost immediately, he is arrested.

- And a couple of days into his incarceration, King begins to write the famous Letter from Birmingham Jail.

- And he is really responding to the ministers who are still saying, 'wait'.

But in his letter, King goes on and on about, 'you think that this is not an opportune time, but for black people, who have been waiting over a hundred years since the Civil War, it was past time'.

- The older people, they were afraid.

So the meetings went down and James Bevel, Fred Shuttlesworth, all of them together and said, 'here's what, what would happen, if the children went out'?

And so, had a meeting with Martin.

Martin says, 'oh no'.

- James Bevel was a fairly new, younger member of the SCLC staff and was just sort of a wild and crazy man.

- But Shuttlesworth had talked about training high school kids to become part of the protests, a good bit earlier, before Bevel ever came to Birmingham.

- But I said, 'nothing better the young people can learn, while they're this young, than to be free and to fight for freedom.

They'll understand it'.

- As a teacher, what I did was to try to get my students to understand that, American government said that all people should be equal.

There were places in this country that they could go and be served without regard to race.

Why not Birmingham?

- Because of the failure, on the part of the adults, to show up in large numbers.

It's like, you look out and you use who you've got.

- Let's start with students who are already in leadership capacities and, assuming that they had some influence, they could invite and influence other young people to become part of the march.

- One of the speakers at the first mass meeting that I attended, he started asking questions.

He asked about the football team, 'do any of your boys play on the football team?

Have you ever wondered why your helmets, always blue and white when you get them, but your school colors are green and gray'?

He said, they come from Ramsay.

When they get new equipment, you get their old equipment.

And I thought, 'well, that's not fair'.

- And so as he began to point out the inequities, then it's at that point they, yeah, well that's not right.

- He said, 'if you wanna do something about it, you can.

Your parents can't, but you really don't have anything to lose because you're getting a second class education'.

- When Reverend Shuttlesworth talked about dismantling segregation, and I said, 'okay, he's saying that things will be better if we're able to march and overcome the system that we have.

Things will be better in Birmingham'.

- We were told that you might be hit or called a name, but you can only kneel and pray or sing a freedom song.

You cannot fight back.

- I remember when King said, 'this is a non-violent movement.

If you cannot be non-violent, we ask that you step aside right now'.

And none of us wanted to be the person who caused the movement to fail.

You know, who messed everything up.

- But as children, we wanted desperately to participate in the movement.

Elementary school kids like myself, we were begging, begging our parents to allow us to go and march.

- And then as they continued to plan this event for the children's march, they called it D-Day.

- Bevel also communicated with the local radio stations.

Of course, they talked in code to the students that were listening.

- We said, 'get your toothbrush, get your bag'.

'Cause we will tell them that, they may go to jail.

We said, well you may have to spend the night, but we were talking about going to jail.

- It's going to be a party in the park.

We going to jump and shout, we going to turn it out.

- At that time, any Negro knew that the park they talk about is downtown.

Only park they could go to was Kelly Ingram Park.

- The decision to march the children had been extremely controversial.

You know, they said, if we have a dead child, the movement, it will never get over it.

So Shuttlesworth is essentially the only elder, you know, decision-maker who is on board with marching the children.

- But the children were the ones that had volunteered.

Most of the adults were afraid to volunteer.

- King is really wishy-washy about it.

He can't make up his mind.

And he is still in his silk pajamas trying to make up his mind when the kids hit the street.

- D-day was May the second, 1963.

It was a Thursday.

And I remember waking up with my mind on freedom.

And as I was leaving, my mother cautioned me, 'I'm sending you to school.

Don't you go and get yourself in any trouble.

I don't have money to get you out'.

And I said, 'yes ma'am'.

That's what she needed to hear.

And I actually was going to school.

I just wasn't gonna stay.

- As far away as Fairfield, Bessemer we're talking children walking all the way from wherever they may have been to downtown Birmingham, because now 16th Street has become the meeting place.

They were sending them on a wild goose chase.

So one group of kids may have walked out of one door, officers are trying to arrest them, and the main group, whose destination is downtown Birmingham, they hopefully will make it through as officers start chasing other children.

- After the first day of the children's marches, D-Day, they realize that the police, of course, is kind of overwhelmed.

- So later on Friday, we were transported from the county jail to the state fairground.

- The numbers just skyrocketed.

And it was then they actually did fill the jails.

- May 3rd is Double D Day, and kids go out to march again.

- The surprise was Bull Connor being there with not only the policemen and the dogs, but the water hoses and the little army tank.

And they sprayed us with those water hoses.

They hurt.

I remember thinking that no one said anything about water hoses.

- Shuttlesworth and King and Abernathy get in a car and they're cruising around.

They see the kids, you know, running around and everything.

And he goes, we've almost got it, like, one more day.

He goes, 'we got the town'.

- And since it was the merchants, owners of the department stores whose businesses were taking it on the chin from the failure of whites to go downtown to buy their Easter dresses for their little girls, they began to negotiate with the Senior Citizens Committee, that Sid Smyer had put together in the latter part of 1962.

- So the Justice Department decides to send down it's Assistant Attorney General in charge of civil rights, Burke Marshall, to try to see if he can get things resolved.

- Well, they generally kept Shuttlesworth away from the negotiations because they thought that Fred was likely to be too hotheaded.

- I said, 'now Martin, don't forget.

We are not calling it off under any circumstances'.

- The Tuesday after D-Day and Double D-Day, while they're meeting, sirens are going on outside, they have the sheriff come and say, you know, that the kids are all at the fairgrounds.

It looks like a concentration camp.

And what they're trying to do is to get these powerful business men to agree in principle to approving a deal with King to stop the demonstrations.

- There were actually, like, seven different components or things that Reverend Shuttlesworth wanted to see happen in Birmingham.

- Desegregation of lunch counters, of the bathrooms, fitting rooms, and the promotion of some African Americans to the floor out of the janitorial ghetto of the workforce.

- Shuttlesworth was all over the place.

He was in the streets a lot of the time when the demonstrations were going on.

And that included when the fire hoses were being used.

- Shuttlesworth realizes that the kids are out of control.

So he goes back to the church in Kelly Ingram Park, and he starts sweeping around the park to gather them, get them back in the church.

- He heard somebody say, 'there's the reverend, let's put some water on him'.

It hit him with enough force, in the midsection, bruised a rib.

Connor learns that he was hurt and was taken from the scene in an ambulance.

- Oh, Mr. Connor, did you know?

He said, '#*#*#*#* I wished I'd have been there to see it'.

He said, 'what happened'?

He said, 'took him away in an ambulance, took him to the hospital'.

He said, 'I wish they took him away in a hearse', that meant dead.

- The merchants kept saying, 'we don't wanna make any decisions while protests are going on'.

So King decides to go along with that and calls a 24-hour moratorium on marches.

- Well, there were seven demands that Reverend Shuttlesworth said had to be made.

And then of the seven, I think they initially agreed to five.

So when Shuttlesworth hears about the meeting, and he is asked to come to the meeting, he is very upset.

- Shuttlesworth comes in and he plops down in the chair.

- And he says, why have you called me in out of my sick bed?

King says, 'here it is, Fred.

We've decided we have to call off the demonstrations'.

And Shuttlesworth says, 'we who'?

- Well, I had to say to Martin, 'no, we're not gonna call it off'.

I put some invectiveness.

Some words, 'Hell no, we can't call it off'.

These people trust me.

And we can't come into Birmingham and leave.

And fourth thousand kids go to jail.

- You go into communities, you stir things up, and then when you leave, you leave behind lost jobs, and destruction and a backlash, you know, in the communities themselves.

You're Mr. Big now, but if you leave Birmingham prematurely, you'll be Mr. #* #* #* #*.

- Reverend Shuttlesworth said he used some words that were not Sunday School words.

He did not want things to stop until they agreed to all seven.

And then for King to have just caved in, he felt, at five, he was very upset.

- That was, I think May 8th.

It was a 24-hour moratorium.

May 10th was the day that they sat at a table, in the courtyard at Gaston Motel.

- I think you can see, looking at his face that this was not something he wanted.

- The city of Birmingham has reached an accord with its conscience.

Birmingham may well offer, for 20th century America an example of progressive racial relations.

And for all mankind, the dawn of a new day, a promise for all men, a day of opportunity and a new sense of freedom for all Americans.

- Shuttlesworth delivered the first lines and then he left because he was still extremely weak.

And he basically fainted as he walked away.

- I think what I felt was a sense of pride.

And in my mind I thought we had overcome.

- We had a sense of entitlement that we could be considered to be citizens and human beings rather than property.

And that gave the community, here in Smithfield, and in Birmingham at large, I think, a sense of oneness.

It was a wonderful time.

We thought that if we could overcome racial hatred in Birmingham, Alabama, if we can do it in Birmingham, we can do it anywhere in the world.

- Of course, I learned a few months later that that was certainly not the case.

(melancholy music) - It was Youth Day.

We were excited because Cynthia Wesley and I had a club meeting that would've started at three o'clock, and the 'Birmingham World', had allowed us to put an article in the paper.

I think everyone was excited, was looking forward to the day.

I arrived at Sunday school at 9:30, and I received the envelopes for offering and the Sunday school books, and it was my job to just pass this stuff out.

And I reached the top of the stairs, the phone in that room was ringing, and when I answered the phone, the caller on the other end said, 'three minutes'.

And I take 15 steps into the sanctuary, and that's where I was, holding the stuff I had collected, and the bomb exploded.

(pensive music) Would be probably about 2:30 or three o'clock before I knew that my friends had not made it out of the bathroom.

And I didn't know what to do with that.

- Cynthia and I were friends.

We weren't related, but Wesley was my maiden name.

She did not demonstrate in the spring.

She was at school.

And I felt like they got the wrong Wesley girl.

I didn't express that, but that's how I felt.

And I was devastated.

I didn't talk about it to anybody.

Part of it was just too painful to talk about.

Part of it was, I was afraid, suppose they come looking for the right one.

It was a pretty tough time I thought.

- Monday morning I was at school at eight o'clock.

There was no moment of silent prayer, there was no assembly.

No one ever asked, 'are you okay?

Do you wanna talk about what happened?

Do you miss your friends?

Are you afraid'?

It settled very well in my thoughts and my spirit that you could kill people in Birmingham.

And nothing happened.

Black people didn't talk about it because they couldn't do anything about it.

What were they going to say?

- It's kind of popular to think that the bombing changed everything and the scales fell from our eyes and suddenly, you know, Birmingham started behaving.

But that's not what happened.

- We had the bombing of the church and I think, out of sympathy, we passed those 1964 laws.

But when people asked me, 'did the city change'?

what I think happened at that point, we just sort of stood still for a little bit.

- I think adults felt that the cost was too high to get what we got.

And people just weren't willing to sacrifice their children like that.

- ♪ I'm on my way ♪ I'm on my way ♪ To freedom land ♪ To freedom land ♪ I'm on my way ♪ I'm on my way ♪ To freedom land ♪ To freedom land - The work that Reverend Shuttlesworth did - The work that Reverend Shuttlesworth did inspired many others to do the same.

- Birmingham changed a lot in the way in which the country managed political issues of race.

- The '64 Civil Rights Act, you know, comes out of Birmingham, it's the most far reaching Civil Rights Act we've had and it comes out of Birmingham.

- His legacy is one of a servant leader.

Just asking the United States to live up to what the Supreme Court and what the constitution and what the law says is possible for all citizens.

- Shuttlesworth had the only functioning mass-movement from the time of the Montgomery bus boycott on.

- Even after the demonstrations in '63, Fred kept demonstrating.

He never quit.

I mean, particularly around police violence and police brutality issues.

- Lots of historians have said that the Birmingham campaign saved the Civil Rights Movement.

the Birmingham campaign saved the Civil Rights Movement.

It's the transition.

It's the the hinge.

- You cannot kill what Fred did and what the Movement did.

Helped to pave the way for a lot of stuff.

- Birmingham was the cradle.

And that impact has been felt, not just in Birmingham, but across the nation, even in other countries.

- Invariably, his work would of course reach South Africa, China, Tienanmen Square, even when the Berlin Wall fell, they're singing, "We Shall Overcome."

But he started right here in his neighborhood trying to make a positive difference.

- His legacy should allow the city of Birmingham citizens to really stand and poke our chest out.

We have a national treasure, a national hero that made a difference, not just in black American's lives, but America.

He fought for change and he won.

- What was the greatest catalyst, in terms of the human being that transformed Birmingham from being the Johannesburg of the South to what it is today.

And I tell you, it's Fred Shuttlesworth.

- His legacy will live on, because what he did changed the world.

- This is Daddy's favorite song to sing with us, okay.

You know it, start off Pat.

- ♪ I'm going to work ♪ Until my day is done ♪ I'm going to work ♪ Til the setting ♪ Of the sun ♪ I'll cease from sorrows ♪ There'll be no tomorrow ♪ I'm going to work ♪ Until my day is done