Civil rights legend Fred Shuttlesworth dies

Fred Shuttlesworth, the last of the "Big Three" of the civil rights movement along with Ralph Abernathy and Martin Luther King Jr., died October 5 in Birmingham, Alabama. He was 89.

To the general public Shuttlesworth was the least well known of the three cofounders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, but few advanced its agenda of nonviolent resistance at greater risk. By his own count Shuttlesworth was bombed twice, beaten into unconsciousness and jailed more than 35 times.

"Fred Shuttlesworth did not become a martyr, and it was not for lack of trying," biographer Andrew Manis said in the Birmingham News.