“From Jim Crow to Juan Crow: Alabama’s Civil Rights Legacy”

Taken from: http://newamericamedia.org/2011/10/alabama-depriving-water-to-immigrants-stirs-civil-rights-memories.php

October 12, 2011

Last week the Water Works — in the ironically named community of Allgood, Ala. — informed local residents that they must now present a valid driver’s license or ID. Otherwise, the notice threatened, “You may lose water service.” The warning stems from part of Alabama’s drastic new immigration law stipulating that no one can qualify for a driver’s license or any other government service in the state unless they can prove citizenship or are otherwise authorized to be in the United States — especially those who are brown or have a Spanish accent.

Water as a Racial Divide

The official notice from the Allgood Alabama Water Works was not the first time the good citizens of the Cotton State have used water as a racial divide.

Similar images flowed through my mind during a long bus ride 46 years ago. I was on my way to join the 1965 civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery. That was a time of shocking black-and-white TV pictures of police blasting demonstrators off their feet with water canons, a time of separate toilets and water fountains — legislated by other laws — for blacks and whites.

Today, Jim Crow has become Juan Crow.

Last week’s eager decision on the Water Works by the Allgood mayor streamed from the unexpected ruling by U.S. District Judge Sharon Lovelace Blackburn in Birmingham. Although she nullified much of Alabama’s new anti-immigrant law, she left intact clauses that authorize police to demand “papers” showing citizenship or immigration status, such as during traffic stops, and denying the parched but undocumented so much as a tap of water.

Frightened by Judge Blackburn’s decision, Alabama’s growing Latino population is now fleeing that state in huge numbers. One small town, Albertville, lost a substantial part of its Hispanic population — including those with documentation to be in the United States — practically overnight. While local farmers and contractors complain that the exodus leaves them without enough labor to harvest crops and complete their jobs, I wonder how many of those in flight from the prospect of police harassment are fully established U.S. citizens, born and bred here – like me, and maybe you, too.

Judge Blackburn also preserved a requirement compelling public schools to verify the immigration status of children and their parents. That, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center is “a provision that will have a chilling effect on children’s access to public schools.” Of course, outrage and condemnation over the immigration law will continue to flare in the coming weeks, and the Obama administration has asked for a federal court injunction to stop implementation of the law until it can work its way through the federal judiciary.

Rolling Toward Selma

But the Alabama decision–coming the same week that witnessed the death of Fred Shuttelsworth, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King, Jr., andDerrick Bell, the Harvard law civil rights advocate–sent my mind rolling back through Birmingham on a chartered bus full of college students almost a half-century ago.

I was 19 and one of about 20,000 people wheeling in from around the country following Bloody Sunday. That was the police riot that left protesters like John Lewis — now a member of Congress — bloodied as they tried peacefully to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the first leg of a march to the state capital in Montgomery. Decades before Twitter feeds existed, and long before anyone called us baby boomers, calls had gone out for student support. Organizers at the University of Minnesota, where I was a sophomore, mustered enough of us to fill two, maybe three buses.  In the ensuing days after the attack on the marchers, U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy called out the National Guard to protect marchers from the likes of the Klan and police thugs, such as Selma Sheriff Jim Clark and Birmingham’s Commissioner of Public Safety, one Eugene “Bull” Connor.

As our Minnesota bus traveled south through the afternoon and night, I hunched sleepily against a bus window. In the aisle seat next to me was my college roommate, Teferi, a fellow journalism student from Ethiopia.

In the early morning light, I felt the bus pull into a gas station. Drowsy at first, I took in the station’s homespun blue-and-white paint job. Then I found myself wide awake at a sight I’d only read about until that moment. Two water fountains were marked “For Whites” and “Colored.” I was not prepared for the jarring emotional impact that sight had on me. As I glanced over at my ebony friend and idol, Teddy (whom we on the Minnesota Daily staff all called the coolest, most worldly guy), I felt tears moisten my eyes and anger tighten my chest. There it was, right in front of us, in all of its banal, institutionalized expression of fear and hatred. The prosaic sight now before me was somehow even more unsettling than the televised images of police dogs, Billy clubs and flailing limbs in water.

By Alabama law, Teddy and I simply could not share the same spout for a drink of water because — because why? The gas-station stop was quick, and only those with a morning urge got off the bus; we were trying to get to Selma and the Brown AME Church as soon as possible before heading out to join march.

The decades have rolled by like so many state “Welcome To …” signs, and the years have sped along fueled by many causes, loves and regrets, among the latter a falling out with Teddy — all my fault — that remains unrepaired. But in the miles toward Selma that morning — and again now — I couldn’t help but think of the folk-music inquiry of those days, “When will they ever learn?” Sad to say, even after this “long time passing,” the answer remains, not yet…

“Civil Rights Leader Shuttleworth Dies”

Taken from: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44788700/ns/us_news-life/#

October 5, 2011

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — The Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, who was bombed, beaten and repeatedly arrested in the fight for civil rights and hailed by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. for his courage and tenacity, has died. He was 89.

Relatives and hospital officials said Shuttlesworth died Wednesday at a Birmingham hospital. A former truck driver who studied religion at night, Shuttlesworth became pastor of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1953 and soon emerged as an outspoken leader in the struggle for racial equality. ”My church was a beehive,” Shuttlesworth once said. “I made the movement. I made the challenge. Birmingham was the citadel of segregation, and the people wanted to march. In his 1963 book “Why We Can’t Wait,” King called Shuttlesworth “one of the nation’s most courageous freedom fighters … a wiry, energetic and indomitable man.”

Mayor William Bell ordered city flags lowered to half-staff until after Shuttleworth’s funeral. Bell, who is black, said he would not be mayor if not for leaders like Shuttlesworth. ”Dr. Shuttlesworth means so much to this city and his legacy will continue for generations,” he said.

Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth right,  escorts Dwight Armstrong, 9, and his brother Floyd, 11, from the Graymont Elementary School in Birmingham, Ala, Sept. 9, 1963. State troopers, on order from the governor, opened the school but turned the African Americans away.

Shuttlesworth survived a 1956 bombing, an assault during a 1957 demonstration, chest injuries when Birmingham authorities turned fire hoses on demonstrators in 1963, and countless arrests. ”I went to jail 30 or 40 times, not for fighting or stealing or drugs,” Shuttlesworth told grade school students in 1997. “I went to jail for a good thing, trying to make a difference.” Alabama’s first black federal judge, U.W. Clemon, said Shuttlesworth flung himself at injustice well knowing he could be killed at any moment. “He was the first black man I knew who was totally unafraid of white folks,” said Clemon, who retired from the bench and is now an attorney in private practice. Shuttlesworth remained active in the movement in Alabama even after moving in 1961 to Cincinnati, where he was a pastor for most of the next 47 years. He moved back to Birmingham in February 2008 for rehabilitation after a mild stroke. That summer, the once-segregated city honored him with a four-day tribute and named its airport after him. His statue also stands outside the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

In November 2008, Shuttlesworth watched from a hospital bed as Sen. Barack Obama was elected the nation’s first African-American president. The year before, Obama had pushed Shuttlesworth’s wheelchair across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma during a commemoration of the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march — a moment Obama recalled Wednesday. In Washington, Obama released a statement lauding Shuttlesworth as a “testament to the strength of the human spirit” and said America owes him a “debt of gratitude” for his fight for equality.

“As one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Reverend Shuttlesworth dedicated his life to advancing the cause of justice for all Americans,” Obama said. In the early 1960s, Shuttlesworth had invited King back to Birmingham. Televised scenes of police dogs and fire hoses being turned on black marchers, including children, in the spring of 1963 helped the rest of the nation grasp the depth of racial animosity in the Deep South. ”He marched into the jaws of death every day in Birmingham before we got there,” said Andrew Young, the former Atlanta mayor and U.N. ambassador who served as an aide to King.

Young said it was Shuttlesworth’s fearlessness that persuaded King to take the struggle to Birmingham. ”We shouldn’t have been strong enough to take on Birmingham … But God had a plan that was far better than our plan,” Young said. “Fred didn’t invite us to come to Birmingham. He told us we had to come.” Referring to the city’s notoriously racist safety commissioner, Shuttlesworth would tell followers, “We’re telling ol’ ‘Bull’ Connor right here tonight that we’re on the march and we’re not going to stop marching until we get our rights.” According to a May 1963 New York Times profile of Shuttlesworth, Connor responded to the word Shuttlesworth had been injured by the spray of fire hoses by saying: “I’m sorry I missed it. … I wish they’d carried him away in a hearse.” Fellow civil rights pioneer the Rev. Joseph Lowery said Shuttlesworth was determined. ”When God made Bull Connor, one of the real negative forces in this country, He was sure to make Fred Shuttlesworth.” Lowery said.

While King won international fame, Shuttlesworth was relatively little known outside Alabama. But he was a key figure in Spike Lee’s 1997 documentary, “4 Little Girls,” about the September 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four black children.

Shuttlesworth was born March 18, 1922, near Montgomery and grew up in Birmingham. As a child, he knew he would either be a minister or a doctor and by 1943, he decided to enter the ministry. He began his theological courses at night while working as a truck driver and cement worker by day. He was licensed to preach in 1944 and ordained in 1948. It was 1954 when King, then a pastor in Montgomery, came to Birmingham to give a speech and asked to stop by Bethel Baptist and meet Shuttlesworth. Then in late 1955 in Montgomery, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus, prompting the boycott led by King that gave new impetus to the civil rights movement. In January 1956, King’s Montgomery home was bombed while he attended a rally. Eleven months later, on Christmas night 1956, 16 sticks of dynamite were detonated outside Shuttlesworth’s bedroom as he slept at the Bethel Baptist parsonage. No one was injured in either bombing, although shards of glass and wood pierced Shuttleworth’s coat and hat left hanging on a hook. The next day, Shuttlesworth led 250 people in a protest of segregation on buses in Birmingham.