Word: shuttlesworth
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...Fred Shuttlesworth, 43, for years a top deputy to Martin Luther King, is an old hand at organizing nonviolent demonstrations. But he isn't quite so skilled at dispersing them-at least when they happen in his own church. Last week, for the second Sunday in a row, Cincinnati police were called out because of disorders during the services at Shuttlesworth's all-Negro Revelation Baptist Church. The troublemakers were not marauding whites, but a "Freedom Committee" of dissident church members who object to Shuttlesworth's "dictatorial" ways...
Pastor of Revelation since 1961, Shuttlesworth has spiritually satisfied the 1,200-member congregation with his eloquent preaching, but he has annoyed some trustees and deacons by assuming total personal control of the church's finances and administration. Trouble came to a head in July when Shuttlesworth abruptly suspended Revelation's Sunday school superintendent for disobeying his orders. Although he later reinstated the superintendent, a number of church leaders decided that the time had come to have a showdown...
...When Shuttlesworth began reading the announcements during a Sunday service, Deacon Robert Pierce rose to declare that the trustees had called an open meeting to discuss Revelation's financial affairs. Shuttlesworth ruled him out of order, and 200 members of the congregation began chanting: "We want a meeting! We want a meeting!" The commotion lasted for nearly an hour, while the police stood by in case things got out of hand. Back came the cops again last Sunday, when Shuttlesworth got into another shouting match with the dissidents...
...content with demonstrations, the Freedom Committee got a court injunction restraining Shuttlesworth from spending any more church money, and filed suit for an accounting of Revelation's funds since he became pastor. Shuttlesworth hit back with a court order of his own, restraining the dissident leaders from disrupting any more Sunday services. He charges that the fuss is all part of a right-wing plot, fostered by the dissidents' white lawyer, to discredit the civil rights movement...
...answers the Freedom Committee: the issues are simply Shuttlesworth's one-man rule over church finances, and the question of how much time he should spend away from church working for Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The accusations stagger Pastor Shuttlesworth. "If I'm a dictator, I'm a benevolent one," he says. "I sleep with the parishioners on my mind, thinking of their misdeeds and the evil in their hearts...