A Fire You Can't Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham's Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth.

A Fire You Can't Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham's Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. By Andrew M. Manis. Religion and American Culture. (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, c. 1999. Pp. xxxiv, 541. $29.95, ISBN 0-8173-0968-3.)

Even his friends, admirers, and close family members often found the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth hard to take. Shuttlesworth was vain, egocentric, and overbearing; he gave little thought to the opinions of other people; and, in the judgment of one colleague, he was "wild for publicity ... almost to the point of neurosis" (p. 196). Compared to Martin Luther King Jr., his comrade in the civil rights movement, Shuttlesworth was poorly trained in theology and lacked both intellectual depth and social polish. Yet as Andrew Manis argues in this superb biography, Shuttlesworth's faults were inextricably linked to his strengths, and they made this combative clergyman indispensable to the civil rights movement.

Shuttlesworth was pastor of Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1956 when the state of Alabama outlawed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He stepped into the breach and, with a sense of divinely inspired mission, displayed tenacity, ingenuity, wit, and breathtaking physical courage in the teeth of persecution and threats of violence from police, politicians, and Klansmen. Shuttlesworth founded and led the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) and was also a founding member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He laid the groundwork for SCLC's 1963 protest campaign that provided the civil rights movement--then languishing and in danger of defeat--with a strategic breakthrough. Despite the fact that this victory was a joint ACMHR-SCLC effort, King reaped most of the glory.

Although most of the book deals with the years from 1956 to 1963, when his subject mounted a "frontal assault on the evil of segregation" in Birmingham (p. 123), Manis's account of Shuttlesworth's early years is crucially important in explaining his rough-hewn strength. He was raised by a strict, caring mother and an abusive stepfather, and he received vital encouragement from black teachers in Alabama's black public schools. Shuttlesworth supported himself and a growing family through laboring jobs while he trained for the ministry at Selma University, a private Baptist institution. When the time came the church provided a springboard for civil rights leadership.

His riveting preaching and audacious defiance of notorious racist Eugene "Bull" Connor, Birmingham's commissioner of public safety, enabled Shuttlesworth to build a strong personal following at a time when state repression made it extremely difficult for black organizations to function. Impossibly fearless, and buoyed by supreme confidence that God was on his side, he demanded the recruitment of black policemen, protested against bus segregation, and attempted to integrate the public schools. Shuttlesworth survived the demolition of his home by Klan bombers and was instantly convinced that "the only reason God saved me was to lead the fight" (p. 109).

Critics considered Shuttlesworth's impulsive tactics ill thought-out, and his abrasive, autocratic style of leadership had little appeal to the black middle class. Nevertheless his raw courage and unstoppability afforded SCLC the time and the opportunity to map out an effective campaign of nonviolent direct action. Shuttlesworth felt usurped and even betrayed by King, who accepted a pallid compromise mediated by the Kennedy administration, as the protests of April and May 1963 moved to a ragged and unsatisfactory conclusion. However, unlike Glenn Eskew in But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (Chapel Hill, 1997), which covers much of the same ground, Manis refuses to take Shuttlesworth's side against King in a partisan manner. Manis coolly and even-handedly analyzes the relationship between the two men and shows empathy for both of their positions. One cannot but admire the way in which Manis, who obtained Shuttlesworth's cooperation in writing this biography, succeeds in distancing himself from his subject in order to retain a sense of objectivity throughout the book. Although he plainly admires Shuttlesworth and is determined to give him his due, Manis does not hesitate to point out his subject's errors and faults. This is very much a warts-and-all portrait, and the author's judicious tone inspires confidence.

A Fire You Can't Out demonstrates that Fred Shuttlesworth helped to make the civil rights movement the success, albeit partial success, that it undoubtedly was. Manis correctly places black southerners' religious faith, and Shuttlesworth's profound commitment to the Christian ministry, at the center of his analysis. Manis's refusal to make exaggerated claims for his subject makes his interpretation of Shuttlesworth's role wholly plausible. Thoroughly researched and wonderfully written, A Fire You Can't Put Out bears comparison with Taylor Branch's biography of King and is certainly one of the best studies of the civil rights movement to appear in recent years.

ADAM FAIRCLOUGH

University of East Anglia