Two Civil Rights Pioneers Gone

Two more names for the list of Liberal Fighters for the People that history books overlook.

Via Attaturk at Firedoglake:

(L)et’s just say Fred Shuttlesworth was arguably the bravest American of the 1960s.

The Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, 89, one of the bravest and most dynamic leaders of the civil rights movement, who survived bombings, beatings and dozens of arrests in his efforts to end segregation in Birmingham, Ala., and throughout the South, died Oct. 5 at a Birmingham hospital. His daughter Carolyn Shuttlesworth said the cause of death was not known. Rev. Shuttlesworth had been in poor health since having a stroke four years ago. Rev. Shuttlesworth, a Baptist minister and co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, helped establish nonviolent resistance as a central tenet of the civil rights movement, often at great personal risk. In the early 1960s, he and other protesters were attacked with truncheons, fire hoses and dogs unleashed by Birmingham’s public safety commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor. When the images of violence were shown on television and newspaper front pages, the horrors of segregation could no longer be ignored by the rest of the nation. Rev. Shuttlesworth is often ranked in the highest tier of the nation’s civil rights leaders, alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, but few suffered more on the front lines. He was, King once said, “the most courageous civil rights fighter in the South.”

Read the whole thing.

Then read this in the New York Times:

Derrick Bell, a legal scholar who worked to expose the persistence of racism in America through his books and articles and his provocative career moves — he gave up a Harvard Law School professorship to protest the school’s hiring practices — died on Wednesday in New York. He was 80.

SNIP

Mr. Bell was the first tenured black professor at Harvard Law School and later the first black dean of a law school that is not historically black. But he was perhaps better known for resigning from prestigious jobs than for accepting them.

In his 20s, while working at the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, he was told to give up his membership in the N.A.A.C.P., which his superiors believed posed a conflict of interest. Instead, he quit the Justice Department, ignoring the advice of friends to try to change things from within.
Thirty years later, when he left Harvard Law School, he rejected similar advice. At the time, he said, his wife, Jewel Hairston Bell, asked him, “Why does it always have to be you?”

In “Ethical Ambition,” a memoir published in 2002, Mr. Bell wrote that his wife’s question trailed him afterward, as did another posed by his colleagues: “Who do you think you are?”

Addressing law students grappling with career decisions, he extolled what he called “a life of meaning and worth,” even though, he wrote, he sometimes alienated associates who saw his actions as “futile and foolish.”

The great icons of civil rights and liberal progress in general are important, but when we let emphasis on the few well-known giants erase the courageous work of the lesser-known, we rob our children of the idea that everyone has something to contribute, that you don't have to be "great" to do great things.