Rachele Fruit, Socialist Workers Party candidate for president, visited the Fred Shuttlesworth Archive at the Greater New Light Baptist Church in Cincinnati Sept. 21. Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth was a leader of the mass proletarian movement that overturned Jim Crow segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. Fruit was welcomed by Rev. Stevie Bester, on the left, Shuttlesworth’s grandson.
Fred Shuttlesworth’s home, above, in Birmingham was firebombed by the Ku Klux Klan on Dec. 25, 1956. Bester told Fruit the family moved from Birmingham to Cincinnati after the bombing, and Shuttlesworth went back and forth between the two cities.
In 1963, Shuttlesworth led thousands of youth in street battles in what became known as the Battle of Birmingham, in the face of mass arrests, vicious cop assaults and criticism by U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The intransigence of the fighters who took part was key in bringing down segregation there. Their victory gave powerful impetus to the movement for Black rights throughout the country.