What Abraham Lincoln was to the nineteenth century, Martin Luther King, Jr., has become to the twentieth: an icon of moral purpose and tragic ends. King's peer, John F. Kennedy, once seemed more mythically charmed, but his reputation has faded in memory. FDR? A great political leader but now an idol only to political scientists. King's memory has grown with time and now stands alone. The Lincoln Memorial, with its brooding, somber, elevated view of Washington, would serve as an excellent model for a memorial to King. In our minds he belongs in a Greek temple sooner than a red–brick black Baptist church.

A Fire You Can't Put Out A Fire You Can't Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham's Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth by Andrew M. Manis Univ. of Alabama Press 1999, 541 pp.; $29.95

The trouble with mythology is that while it heightens truth, it also works to distort it. In the case of King, his sacred status makes it hard to see him clearly as he was, and hard to see the civil rights movement as the diverse, fractious, lurching improvisation that it was. King seems to swallow everything, so that nothing seems to have happened unless and until he appeared on the scene, and all civil rights leaders get appraised strictly by how they related to King.

This pertains to Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, or else I would not begin this review of his biography by writing of King. Shuttlesworth, however, has a helpful capacity to stand apart. Though he worked closely with King in some of the most dramatic episodes of the civil rights movement, Shuttlesworth was an utterly independent variable: rough and untutored where King was smooth; hasty to a fault where King could be cautious and hesitant; a leader instinctively drawn to the danger of the front lines, while King might be more likely found in a hotel room, plotting the next move. Nobody ever thought of Shuttlesworth as King's lieutenant.

Shuttlesworth made his mark in Birmingham, Alabama, where he grew up, and where in 1953 at the age of 30 he became pastor of the Bethel Baptist Church. Birmingham had a reputation for mean, violent white supremacy. About 50 black homes were bombed there between 1947 and 1963, thus earning the city the nickname, "Bombingham." Nevertheless, Shuttlesworth soon began to challenge white authority, demanding African American police officers, trying to integrate schools and buses, and, after Alabama courts banned the NAACP from the state, founding The Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR). He would later help found King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and serve as an officer. He spoke for civil rights all over the United States.

Essentially, though, Shuttlesworth remained a local leader and pastor. It was in Birmingham that he repeatedly challenged segregation, was beaten, bombed, and jailed but refused to quit. In Birmingham he became closely involved with the Freedom Riders, and with the dramatic events of the Birmingham protests, where Eugene "Bull" Connor brought out fire hoses and dogs to quell demonstrations of schoolchildren.

Shuttlesworth had attended college, but he lacked the education and polish of middle–class African American pastors and businessmen. In Birmingham they looked askance at his leadership, considering him brash and intemperate. They could never ignore him, though, because he had an utterly loyal following. His congregation was working class, and his rough–hewn, action–oriented rhetoric spoke to them. Above all he led by example. When brash young Freedom Riders were repeatedly beaten in Alabama for trying to desegregate Greyhound buses, Attorney General Robert Kennedy tried to to talk Shuttlesworth out of accompanying them on the life–threatening trip to Mississippi, quipping, "Oh my God, Reverend Shuttlesworth, the Lord hasn't even been to Mississippi in a long time." Kennedy was genuinely fearful that they would be murdered .

"Mr. Kennedy," Shuttlesworth answered, "would I ask anybody else to do what I wouldn't do? I'm a battlefield general. I lead troops into battle. Yes, sir, I'm gon' ride the bus. I've got my ticket."

King's great genius lay in his ability through rhetoric and symbolism to bridge gaps: to make northern whites empathize with southern blacks, to engage cautious middle–class African American pastors in dangerous crusades while also drawing hot–headed young people into a calculated, nonviolent movement rife with religious symbolism. Shuttlesworth, by contrast, had all the bridging qualities of a sharp stick. He won a reputation in the movement for absolute fearlessness, for reckless and unattractive egotism, for dictatorial leadership. He and Bull Connor seemed made for each other. Yet Shuttlesworth, in his own way, was indispensable to the movement. Without his working–class following, and without Shuttlesworth's insistence on confrontation, the SCLC and King would never have tackled Birmingham.