The Working Class & Mass Meetings

The Working Class and Mass Meetings. March Route for Moral Justice. The "sudden" emergence of the ACMHR ministers left White leaders "dumbfounded” and deeply concerned about how they could be controlled. At first, they called Rev. Shuttlesworth and his fellow ministers “radicals” and “Communists," "outsiders” who tricked their church members through force and lies. They asked moderate Black middle-class leaders, who followed a more conservative approach to ending racial segregation, to address the growing militants among the masses in the African-American community. But they could not. The ACMHR's leaders had become a force to be reckoned with. And no one could stop their fiery general, Rev. Shuttlesworth. The ACMHR came to be known simply as “Shuttlesworth's organization." , Paired marker , June 1956 , Each Monday night, Rev. Shuttlesworth led mass meetings at Bethel Baptist. Other ACMHR ministers did the same at their churches. The meetings inspired and informed ACMHR members, who numbered between 900 and 1,200. More than half were women. Members were mainly working class people, including a large percentage of unskilled or semi-skilled workers. Compared to the NAACP, the ACMHR received little financial support from upper- and middle-class Blacks, who thought the new organization was too militant. Less than a year after the ACMHR began, Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor sent plainclothes police detectives to secretly record the mass meetings. Their written records would later be valuable sources of information for historians of the Birmingham Movement. , "Our basis of support was poor people giving their money!" , Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth , Bethel Baptist's pastor, from 1953 to 1961, in a 1998 interview., Lesson F5: What was a "mass meeting church" and how did their meetings contribute to the Civil Rights Movement?