He had led an unsuccessful campaign to convince the Birmingham Police Department to hire black officers and accompanied Autherine Lucy and Arthur Shores in the short-lived integration of the University of Alabama.
He was membership chairman for the Alabama chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and was the featured speaker in a January 1956 Emancipation Rally sponsored by the NAACP.
"[1] The group met on June 4, 1956, and drafted a 7-point "Declaration of Principles": The ACMHR was formally created at a mass meeting of 1,000 enthusiastic blacks at Alford's Sardis Baptist Church the following night.
Shuttlesworth, acclaimed unanimously as president of the new group, recounted from the pulpit vicious lynchings and gross lapses of justice across the South, concluding that "these are dark days" before announcing that "hope is not dead.
[3] Initially, the ACMHR continued the NAACP's tactics of filing lawsuits challenging enforcement of the city's segregation laws and also modeled itself on the Montgomery Improvement Association in attempting to organize African-American citizens for boycotts and peaceful demonstrations.
When the city refused, Shuttlesworth organized a display of peaceful civil disobedience in which hundreds of African Americans boarded buses and sat in "Whites only" seats.
In its first three years, the group spent over $40,000 of the $53,000 it raised on legal fees, much of it on black attorneys such as Arthur Shores, Orzell Billingsley, Oscar Adams, and Demetrius Newton of Birmingham and Ernest D. Jackson of Jacksonville, Florida.
Organized opponents of integration, including the Ku Klux Klan and the National States' Rights Party, threatened and intimidated movement supporters and conducted numerous bombings of churches and residences.
Though King urged quick action, Shuttlesworth insisted on waiting until the 1963 Birmingham mayoral election was completed to avoid giving candidate Bull Connor any unintentional assistance with voters wary of "outside agitators".
On the day after the election, won by perceived moderate candidate Albert Boutwell, the ACMHR distributed a "Birmingham Manifesto", outlining the purpose and demands of the campaign.
[4][6] During the campaign, Shuttlesworth acted as an emotional leader for ACMHR's local membership while King, Abernathy, and others made attempts to bring uncommitted parties into the movement.
Their Children's Crusade finally fulfilling the goal of "filling the jails" with nonviolent protesters and eventually providing the photographs and news footage of police dogs and fire hoses that shocked the world's sensibilities.
Shuttlesworth was left off the podium at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and was not invited to join the group traveling to Norway to accept King's Nobel Peace Prize.