By Rabbi Ben Kamin
SAN DIEGO — To quote from historian Diane McWhorter’s recent essay in The New York Times, “If you recognized the name of only one of the two greats who succumbed to cancer [last] Wednesday, that’s perhaps because the work of the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, who died at 89 in a hospital in Birmingham, Ala., was about as low-tech as it gets.” The comparison was to the remarkable Steve Jobs, who was only 56, and who changed the way we exist.
They were both very great men, even as they could not have been more dissimilar. Jobs dealt with cyber-memory; Shuttlesworth created memory. Jobs was the ultimate technician; Shuttlesworth an undisciplined pastoral soldier. Jobs gave us new ways to communicate; Shuttlesworth taught us how to talk to one another. Jobs endowed us with unlimited texting; Shuttlesworth exhorted us with unlimited testing.
Though both men arrived in heaven on the same day, there had to have been two very different portals. Steve Jobs, who heroically battled a devastating cancer and died much too young, doubtless entered a digital password. Fred Shuttlesworth, who managed to survive atrocious racist beatings and frequent unmerited jail stays, probably greeted the angels with a burst of psaltery and a few hard questions about the social structure of paradise.
I use the instruments of Steve Jobs’ genius; I live off the blood and guts of Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth’s uncompromising Southern ministry, which was spent in moral outrage and not a little physical pain and under the shadow of the other two members of the civil rights troika, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ralph David Abernathy.
One incidental similarity between the white scientific prodigy and the black soldier of freedom was their healthy egos. Neither man had great patience for colleagues or protégés who lacked energy, ideas, or follow-through. Shuttlesworth, though linked with King, often admonished King—or worse—for the latter’s abundant polish and rhetoric but alleged deficiency of presence in some of the genuinely treacherous, even deadly confrontations with the ruthless, Pharaonic, Southern sheriffs and deputies in Alabama, Mississippi, and elsewhere who systemically savaged, butchered, and raped black people with state sanction not that long ago.
The fact that King was assassinated at 39 and Shuttlesworth, in spite of many physical attacks, lived to a ripe old age abrogates the criticism. But it was there, and it was unmistakably Fred Shuttlesworth: uncompromising, willful, and undaunted by prison, criticism, and the bombings that afflicted both his home and his church. King and his Atlanta entourage would have never been able to confront the fire-hoses, floggings, and vicious dogs of Birmingham police chief Eugene “Bull” Connor in 1963 had not the hometown pastor already set the stage for the historic confrontation by laying himself literally on the line in the prior months.
A legacy note: My kids are in touch with just about anybody at any time, happily and bloodlessly, with their cell phones and apps thanks to the brilliance of Steve Jobs. My kids are also free to mingle with anybody, anywhere in this land thanks to the blood and righteousness of Fred Shuttlesworth. One said, “iPhone.” The other declared, “I Am Somebody!” I know who I’d have rather met.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in San Diego. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com