Word: shuttlesworth
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Hiring Negroes on the police force was the recurrent demand of civil rights groups since 1955. The lily-white police force was cited again and again as the symbol of the segregated life of Birmingham. The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who stepped into the national limelight when he asked Dr. Martin Luther King to lead massive demonstrations in 1963, became a well-known local leader eight years earlier when he began carrying petitions to Police Commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor asking that the force be integrated...
...same day): In the historic libel decision of New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court overturned a judgment against Shuttlesworth and other civil rights leaders for running an ad in the Times that criticized Birmingham public officials...
Keep Moving. Last week the Supreme Court confronted a loitering conviction that Shuttlesworth earned in 1962 when a Birmingham cop ordered him and his companions to move along. "You mean to say we can't stand here on the sidewalk?" asked Shuttlesworth. "Yes," said the cop. As the others dispersed, Shuttlesworth walked into a store, where the cop arrested him for blocking the sidewalk outside. A nonjury trial netted Shuttlesworth a sentence of 241 days at hard labor...
...vote of 9 to 0, the Supreme Court upheld the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund argument that Shuttlesworth's conviction denied him his constitutional rights. In a tart concurring opinion, Justice Abe Fortas lambasted the conviction as a "façade" for hounding Shuttlesworth because of his leadership of Negro store boycotts. Shuttlesworth may have annoyed the cop, said Fortas, "but a policeman's lot is not a happy one-and certainly, in context, Shuttlesworth's questions did not rise to the magnitude of an offense against the laws of Alabama...
Keep Litigating. Perhaps more significant, Shuttlesworth this month also won a reversal of his 1963 conviction (90 days at hard labor) for parading without a permit in Birmingham. That reversal came from Alabama's own highest state court. Despite his latest victories, Litigant Shuttlesworth is not quite ready to retire. In Cincinnati, where he now runs a Baptist church, he is in a legal skirmish with some of his own parishioners, who charge him with usurping the church trustees' financial power. For all anyone knows, that fight may wind up in the Supreme Court...