In February, I preached considered one of the Black History Month sermons at Zion Baptist Church, a standard Black church in Cincinnati. After the service, Judge Cheryl Grant, a longtime congregant, thanked me for delving into the legacy of civil rights advocate Fred Shuttlesworth.
Grant had been very close with the Shuttlesworth family after they moved from Birmingham to Cincinnati in 1961, and he or she was working on a documentary about him with filmmaker Mark Vikram Purushotham and biographer Andrew M. Manis. Her personal testimony about Shuttlesworth and his story of redemptive motion has been greater than inspiring for me, and now I’d prefer to share his story with a wider audience.
Shuttlesworth is an unsung hero of the civil rights movement. A cofounder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he faced and ultimately outwitted Birmingham’s infamous commissioner of public safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor, to advance racial justice in considered one of America’s most obstinately segregated environments.
What’s been most interesting to me about Shuttlesworth is how he personified the mixture of Christian orthodoxy and freedom fighting that characterised the first stream of the Black church’s social motion tradition. As a pastor and leader, he called himself a biblicist and an actionist, meaning he had a devout faith within the authority of Scripture while believing right doctrine compelled the Christian into social motion.
Shuttlesworth knew preaching against white supremacy wasn’t enough. The church also needed to get out of their seats in the event that they wanted social change (James 2:14–26).
His biography, A Fire You Can’t Put Out, by Manis, recalls Shuttlesworth’s excitement when the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision outlawed segregation in public schools. Initially, Shuttlesworth believed this was an indication that the soul of America was “essentially good” and might be shamed into delivering equality.
However, several years of letdowns thereafter convinced him that “you’ll be able to’t shame segregation. … Rattlesnakes don’t commit suicide; ball teams don’t strike themselves out. You gotta put ’em out,” he said. Like a conniving serpent, the elected officials, corporate executives, and social networks driving a racially unjust system wouldn’t voluntarily cede their undue power and privilege. The church would need to crush the serpent’s head through prayer and motion.
Shuttlesworth’s story is a reminder that the trail to freedom for African Americans has been marked by delays, setbacks, halfhearted commitments, and broken guarantees. And few things capture the detoured route America has taken toward racial justice like Juneteenth, which celebrates news of emancipation reaching Black people in Texas two and a half years after President Abraham Lincoln penned the Emancipation Proclamation. Black Texans endured slavery for an additional quarter of a decade, then needed to survive under the terrorism of Jim Crow for an additional century.
Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it surely bends toward justice.” On the size of God’s plan for the entire world’s redemption, that’s true. But for us, here and now, it’s not true in any natural or inevitable sense. Those words are more artful than historical. Time is neutral, and the arc of history has needed to be wrenched, hammered, and forcefully contorted to render—at best—a crooked zigzag that points somewhere within the vicinity of justice.
Advancing toward a freer society has never been a smooth, constant, upward progression for Black Americans. How are Christians to cope with this reality without falling into the bondage of despair and vengeance the Bible warns about (1 Thess. 4:13; Rom. 12:19)? Here again, Shuttlesworth’s public witness provides us with a fruitful example.
In 1957, Shuttlesworth attempted to enroll his two daughters, Pat and Ruby, in Phillips High School in Birmingham. When they pulled as much as the college, a white mob surrounded them. Shuttlesworth was attacked with bats and chains, and the kicks and thrusts to the bottom scraped a lot of the skin off his face. His wife was stabbed.
When Birmingham’s Black community heard in regards to the beating, they were understandably furious—and wanting to avenge their leader. Days later, an indignant, standing-room–only crowd awaited Shuttlesworth’s orders at a neighborhood church.
With a head bandage and an arm sling, Shuttlesworth urged the audience to reply by redoubling their advocacy efforts, not by behaving destructively. After all, he said, he was the one who’d been attacked, and if he wasn’t going to react in anger, they shouldn’t either. He responded with a grace that redeemed and reordered the tenacious fire burning inside his people—a “heavenly fire.” That grace kept his work righteous, and the people’s tenacity disallowed cowardice and complacency within the face of evil.
Shuttlesworth could’ve moved that emotional crowd to tear town down. It would’ve been an comprehensible response, but in addition shortsighted and counterproductive. Phillips High School would eventually be integrated, not through rage and outbursts but by planning and chronic pressure.
In the previous few years, particularly for the reason that murder of George Floyd, it seems the American evangelical church has gone backward with regards to race relations.
Justice proponents have been expelled from pulpits and jobs. Calculating political activists have made boogiemen out of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs (DEI) and significant race theory (CRT), fostering fears that too many white evangelicals have used as false justification to reject calls to humility or course correction on race issues from Black siblings in Christ. And just as Shuttlesworth discovered greater than half a century ago, basic messages of racial reconciliation have proven insufficient to shame parts of the church into sincere repentance and reparation of an extended and sinful history of division and injustice. Many of my peers have grown uninterested in spinning their wheels.
The proper response to this latest detour is for Christians of all races to turn into more thoroughgoing biblicists and actionists. We must increase our reliance on the Bible and prayer. Undermining or deconstructing the Word of God in response to toxic evangelicalism is the last word cut-your-nose-to-spite-your-face move. The American church’s sins regarding race are a product of its failure to follow the Bible’s mandates, not the consequence of following them too closely. And as actionists, we must apply pressure inside and outdoors the church to force an acknowledgement of and treatment for historical injustice.
Juneteenth is value celebrating not since it signifies the top of suffering and injustice for Black America. While the victory it recalls was late and incomplete, it was a big accomplishment that exposed God’s will and love for his children. Finding gratitude and joy while awaiting the last word success of God’s guarantees is the definition of religion. Happy Juneteenth!
Justin Giboney is an ordained minister, attorney, and the president of the AND Campaign, a Christian civic organization. He’s the coauthor of Compassion (&) Conviction: The AND Campaign’s Guide to Faithful Civic Engagement.
