Attorney General Eric Holder paid a warm, and personal, tribute to the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth on Sunday in Alabama, calling the late civil rights pioneer “both a warrior for justice and an advocate for peace.”
“Throughout his life – as a minister of the faith, and a leader of the civil rights movement – he transcended labels like ‘pioneer’ and ‘role model,’” Holder said at a memorial ceremony at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, where four young black girls were killed by a bomb in 1963. “He became, as President Obama recently noted, nothing less than ‘“a testament to the strength of the human spirit.’”
“Reverend Shuttlesworth helped to lead the movement that remade our society,” Holder said. “And more than half a century ago, he renewed the great, yet unfulfilled promise that first inspired America’s founding: that all its citizens are created equal. For so many decades, he called – and, at times, he pushed – our nation forward. From both the pulpit and the streets, with both his words and his deeds – he demanded and inspired the very best in our people.”
“Reverend Shuttlesworth was often a prime target of hate – and even violence,” Holder recalled. “Over the years, he was spit on. He was savagely beaten. Not once, but on two separate occasions, he was bombed. And, more than 30 times, he was arrested.”
Shuttlesworth, who died in Birmingham on Oct. 5 at the age of 89, often marched alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other giants of the civil rights movement in the turbulent, danger-filled 1960s. In 1963, Holder recalled, Shuttlesworth was arrested on a trumped-up charge of parading without a permit. His case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which held in 1969 that he had been denied a parade permit “not to control traffic, as the state contended, but to censor ideas- powerful ideas rooted both in our Constitution and in our faith.”
Today, Holder said, “although we can be justifiably proud of the steps this country has taken over the years to expand the promise of justice and equality for all Americans, none of us can afford to become complacent.”
Although he did not mention it in his speech, an Alabama immigration law is being challenged by civil rights groups and the Department of Justice (see Main Justice’s recent report.)
Holder, the first black attorney general, was 12 years old in 1963, when Shuttlesworth was being beaten, spat upon and arrested. Holder said Shuttlesworth was not just a “national treasure” but a personal benefactor: “Without him, there would be no me.”
