BIRMINGHAM / October 6, 2022 — Fred Shuttlesworth was the fulcrum of the civil rights movement in Birmingham — and a frequent target of the Ku Klux Klan for his freedom fighting. On Saturday, October 15, dozens of Alabama educators will join in a public workshop that reexamines Shuttlesworth’s authentic, action-driven style of leadership.

“Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth: Actionist for Justice” is a SUPER Teacher workshop presented by the Alabama Humanities Alliance, in partnership with Alabama Public Television. Participants will also get a sneak peek of the new APT documentary, Shuttlesworth, which debuts this December — 100 years after the civil rights icon’s birth.

This Birmingham workshop is open to the media. Registration required.

When: October 15, 2022 | 9 a.m.-noon
Where: Bethel Baptist Church | Birmingham
What: Half-day workshop for Alabama educators
Website: alabamahumanities.org/program/super-teacher

The lead scholar and presenter for this event is David Holmes, Ph.D., dean of Liberal Arts & Sciences at Lipscomb University. Dr. Holmes has authored books and articles about African American language and literature, sermons and speeches of the civil rights movement, and the prophetic legacy of such speeches and the pastors and laypersons who delivered them.

Participating teachers will earn continuing education credits, a $50 stipend and copies of A Fire You Can’t Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth by Andrew Manis, and Where the Sacred and Secular Harmonize: Birmingham Mass Meeting Rhetoric and the Prophetic Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement by David Holmes.

AHA’s SUPER Teacher program offers workshops throughout the state each year that help educators become more knowledgeable, confident, and effective teachers in the classroom.
Learn more: alabamahumanities.org/program/super-teacher.

About the Alabama Humanities Alliance
Founded in 1974, the nonprofit Alabama Humanities Alliance serves as a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. AHA promotes impactful storytelling, lifelong learning and civic engagement. We provide Alabamians with opportunities to connect with our shared cultures and to see each other as fully human. Through our grantmaking, we help scholars, communities and cultural nonprofits create humanities-rich projects that are accessible to all Alabamians — from literary festivals and documentary films to museum exhibitions and research collections. Learn more at alabamahumanities.org.

About Alabama Public Television
Alabama Public Television is a state network of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). We’re committed to enriching the lives of Alabamians through programming that educates and entertains the citizenry and by providing high-quality instructional content for schools statewide. APT also acts as Alabama’s storyteller, presenting the state’s unique heritage and cultural contributions while traveling the road taken through history on the journey to becoming the Alabama of today. Learn more at aptv.org.

By Jedidiah Gist-Anderson

This summer, I had the gracious opportunity to participate in a teaching program through the Alabama Humanities Alliance and the National Endowment for the Humanities. “Stony the Road We Trod” helped me to see Alabama, its unsung heroes, and civil rights foot soldiers in a different light than ever before.

Over the course of this three-week institute, I had the honor to meet civil rights scholars, veterans of the movement, and individuals who were impacted by the movement. There are so many I could talk about, but I want to highlight at least a few moments that truly resonated with me during this experience.

I want to start with Rev. Carolyn McKinstry, who was present on September 15, 1963, when KKK members bombed Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four of Carolyn’s young friends. Her presentation resonated with me — not just because of her personal experience, but with how she took that experience and pursued a life of service and ministry. McKinstry’s message was authentic and sincere; it was a message of redemption and reconciliatory love. Her words reminded me that some church leaders in the movement believed that — even as they fought for their rights — they still tried to love those who ridiculed them, persecuted them, and despised them.

Mrs. Ruby Shuttlesworth Bester’s story about her father made me feel starstruck. I have taught African American Studies for 16 years and never did I ever hear about her father, the late Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth — and I was ashamed. However, just hearing her personal account of witnessing her father’s strength and courage firsthand, and to share that with us, was amazing.

I admired Mrs. Shuttlesworth Bester even before I met here after reading Andrew Manis’ book for the institute: A Fire You Can’t Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. He was a man beyond his years and his dogmatic tenacity invigorated me to fight for what you believe in and to stand on that even if you must stand alone.

Our cohort also had the chance to tour historic sites and museums around the state. That included learning from staff at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Civil Rights Memorial Center and its Learning for Justice program, as well as the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Visiting those sites were the most riveting experiences I have ever encountered outside of visiting Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Israel that I visited when I was a teenager.

It’s one thing to see something so powerful a as the National Memorial for Peace and Justice on television. But to see and touch the names of Black lynching victims from across the country etched into those beams — it hit me to the core emotionally. The SPLC’s presentation about some of those lynchings unearthed some emotions I had not felt in such a long time. Compassion for the victims and their families for what happened to them. And shame and hurt thinking about how lynching was once a part of America’s national character.

This institute also gave me hope, though. For instance, despite all the injustices that have taken place in this nation, the EJI’s Legacy Museum tour ends with hope in a room it calls The Reflection Space. The room illuminates all the African Americans who have worked throughout their lives to make an impact and challenge racial injustice, even with obstacles facing them.

Back home now, one of the things that I am striving to do in my classroom is to never forget the unsung heroes of the civil rights movement, such as Selma’s JoAnne Bland; Freedom Rider and activist Bernard LaFayette; civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo; and civil rights attorney Arthur Shores. They fought to keep the soul of the civil rights movement going by any means necessary. Their authenticity and personal struggles, trials and victories, made me think: Where are our foot soldiers for today?

I will never forget this experience and I plan to spill all this newfound knowledge and information with my students so they can push it forward to the next generation, and so that we do not forget those who were the foot soldiers of the movement.

Jedidiah Gist-Anderson participated in the 2022 cohort of Stony the Road We Trod: Exploring Alabama’s Civil Rights Legacy. Gist-Anderson is a social studies teacher at Mallard Creek High School in Charlotte, North Carolina. He has taught for 16 years and focuses on topics such as civics literacy and African American history.

Reflection by Jen Reidel

“If you all get to tell the story and get it right, then the children will get it right.”
—Dr. Martha Bouyer, Stony the Road project director and an Alabama Humanities Fellow

Thanks to Dr. Bouyer’s passionate vision and leadership — along with the support of the Alabama Humanities Alliance and the National Endowment for the Humanities — 27 teachers from 17 states gave three weeks of their summer to come to Alabama. We came to learn about, deepen, and complicate our understanding of Alabama’s role in the civil rights movement, and to teach it accurately to our students. For me, and I suspect many others in our group, it was all that and much more.

Challenging history, resilience, hope, and transformation are how I would describe my experience as a participant in Stony the Road. Through visits to historic sites, presentations from civil rights scholars, and firsthand stories from those who bore witness to Alabama’s centrality in fight for equality for Black Americans, I gained a deeper and more complex perspective of the civil rights movement and its influence on America today.

As a teacher of U.S. history and civics, I thought I had a decent understanding of the movement; yet through this experience, I have a much broader and more sophisticated grasp of how important Alabama was in the fight for equality in the South and the nation at large. I am excited, as well as challenged, by how this experience will influence and inform my teaching.

On an academic level, the experience has pushed me to reframe my thinking and teaching of the civil rights movement to ensure I’m not perpetuating myths and distorting the realities of the movement. One of the most impacting academic sessions was with scholar Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Ph.D., who identified for us incorrect master narratives that distort the truth of history. He also taught us how to “disrupt” those fallacies with a more well-rounded teaching of civil rights narratives. An example of this is when teachers limit civil rights instruction to the American South. Dr. Jeffries pointed out in doing this it regionalizes white supremacy, distorts and confuses de jure and de facto segregation, and decontextualizes Northern protest. He encouraged us to “complicate the South, add into your teaching the Northern protests.”

Additionally, Dr. Jeffries urged us to abandon teaching a Dr. King-centric approach that suggests: “The movement is MLK, and we wind up running around looking for ‘little Kings.’” When the focus is on the pulpit instead of who was in the pews, students and other learners of history miss studying the richness of the movement and the efforts of the Black working class, the children, and the women who sacrificed for the cause.

Our site-based historical visits through Stony gave life and form to our academic sessions. For me, there are no words to fully describe feelings associated with walking the Edmund Pettus Bridge; worshipping inside the 16th Street Baptist Church; standing on the grounds where men with dogs and hoses attacked children who marched for equality in Kelly Ingram Park; sitting in the pews at Bethel Baptist Church; standing behind Dr. King’s pulpit at Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church; and walking the grounds of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, sometimes called the Lynching Memorial. I know without a doubt that my witness to history through these site visits will deeply impact my students.

Perhaps most transformative for me were the sessions where we listened to and talked with foot soldiers of the cause, daughters of leaders in the movement, and those who lived through this defining period in our nation’s history. For instance, activist and leader Bishop Calvin Woods shared with us about his experiences working within the Birmingham campaign and the sacrifices he made for freedom, including multiple arrests and time behind bars. He told us: “When you are fighting for real rights, there is no color line.”

Hearing the experiences of those in the movement makes this history all the more recent and relevant. Stories such as those from JoAnne Bland, a civil rights activist and an 11-year-old participant in Bloody Sunday in Selma back in 1965. Bland told us that, as a child, freedom for her meant being able to eat ice cream at Carter Drug Co.’s lunch counter in Selma. Similarly, for Janice Kelsey — a Children’s Crusade marcher in 1963 as a high school junior in Birmingham — freedom meant being able to eat at J.J. Newberry’s lunch counter or trying on shoes before buying them in a department store.

We also heard from Barbara Shores, daughter of civil rights attorney Arthur Shores, and Ruby Shuttlesworth Bester, daughter of civil rights leader Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who each spoke about the sacrifices that entire families in the movement made in the fight for equality. Both women shared how it affected them to survive having their homes bombed multiple times by white supremacists, and they revealed the trauma created by those events. Mrs. Shuttlesworth Bester described her family’s sacrifice this way: “Our struggle was one of love, we did what Daddy (Rev. Shuttleworth) asked us to do.” These stories and many others from those who participated in and witnessed history will be invaluable as I teach about civil rights.

I will forever be grateful for the opportunity to confront history in person — up close and alongside some of the finest educators I have met.

History matters and knowing it in its fullness is powerful and transformative.

As civil rights historian and author Glenn Eskew shared with us: “The story (of civil rights in Alabama) is about justice, reconciliation, and changing the world for the better.”

Our students deserve to know the past in all its truth, how it informs the present, and be encouraged by ordinary people who did the extraordinary in their fight for equality. The march continues…

Jen Reidel participated in the 2022 cohort of Stony the Road We Trod: Exploring Alabama’s Civil Rights Legacy. Reidel has served as a teacher for 26 years. She currently teaches civics and U.S. history in the Bellingham School District at Bellingham High School, in Washington.