Birmingham Revolutionaries: the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights.

Edited by Marjorie L. White and Andrew M. Manis. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, c. 2000. Pp. [xii], 80. $22.00, ISBN 0-86554-709-2.)

In May 2001 a jury in Birmingham, Alabama, convicted Thomas Blanton Jr. for the 1963 bombing of a black church that killed four girls; in May 2002 Bobby Frank Cherry was also convicted of the same crime. The conviction of the aging Klansmen almost forty years after the terrorist attack on the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church has reminded the world once again of the bitter struggle for racial equality in the South. During the mid-twentieth century, Birmingham embodied the brutalities of white racism. Persistent legal and extralegal repression chronically impeded black protest. Despite the ever-present danger, one man launched a defiant crusade against the forces of reaction: the Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth. As leader of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, Shuttlesworth negotiated Birmingham's black community through the triumphs and, in the case of the church bombing, the tragedies of the civil rights revolution.

This slim collection of essays is based upon a symposium held in honor of Reverend Shuttlesworth in 1998. In recent years scholars of the civil rights movement have broadened their analysis beyond national leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. to emphasize the importance of community activism. The organizers of the symposium sought to present a case for the national significance of Reverend Shuttlesworth and the black churches that provided the operational center of the Birmingham protest movement.

The papers reproduced in this volume are of variable quality. In the best of the essays, Glenn T. Eskew demonstrates the ideological and strategic tensions between the confrontational Shuttlesworth and the accommodationist black leadership of Birmingham. The essay exposes the class conflicts within the African American community that threatened to destabilize the movement not only in Birmingham but elsewhere. By contrast, Wyatt T. Walker wastes an opportunity to provide a personal insight into the relationship between Shuttlesworth and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which assumed control of the Birmingham movement in 1963. The civil rights veteran instead provides little more than a plodding narrative of the fight against southern racism. It is also disappointing that such a slim volume should contain so many errors. Poor copyediting results in some unintentionally amusing moments, such as a 1961 magazine article about King's principles of nonviolence whose title is given as "The Man Who Fights Hat With Love" (p. 57 n. 12). What does shine through all of these essays is the personal bravery of Shuttlesworth, rooted in his intense religious conviction. When he attempted to register his children at an all-white high school, he suffered a serious beating from a white mob. His church was also bombed on three separate occasions. Yet throughout, Shuttlesworth maintained an absolute conviction in the righteousness of his cause.

Those with any working knowledge of the civil rights movement will find little new here about either Shuttlesworth or Birmingham. Instead they should refer to the outstanding books written by two of the contributors, Eskew's But for Birmingham (Chapel Hill, 1997) and Andrew M. Manis's A Fire You Can't Put Out (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1999). These essays were not, however, intended for a scholarly audience. Should the authors succeed in their objective of securing Shuttlesworth his place in history, they will have served an honorable purpose.

CLIVE WEBB
University of Sussex