18 March
Fred Shuttlesworth
18 March 1922—5 October 2011
Architect of Project C
Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, was one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights organization dedicated to nonviolent opposition to segregation. As such, he was both a practitioner and defender of nonviolence. But as a native of a city that had a well-deserved reputation of being one of the most racist in the United States, Shuttlesworth was well aware of just how entrenched was the hatred of blacks by whites. Eugene “Bull” Connor, the city’s longtime police chief, enforced Jim Crow with an iron fist, and Klan intimidation, both overt and thinly disguised, was common. Shuttlesworth’s own home had been destroyed by a bomb in 1956 in retaliation for his involvement with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). One of the investigating officers, himself a Klansman, ominously advised Shuttlesworth to get out of town.
So Shuttlesworth had a pretty good idea of what he was up against when he spearheaded an anti-segregation campaign in the spring of 1963 that he called “Project C.” The “C” stood for “confrontation.” Recognizing that appeals to conscience alone wouldn’t budge the city’s diehard segregationists, Shuttlesworth determined that nonviolent direct action was necessary. His goal was to provoke a situation so fraught with crisis that Birmingham authorities would be driven to the negotiation table.
The primary kinds of direct action launched by Shuttlesworth were protest marches and sit-ins in restaurants, stores, and such public facilities as libraries. Some blacks also volunteered to conduct “kneel-ins” at all-white churches. Bull Connor and his deputies moved in quickly, swinging their clubs. Connor requested and easily received a city injunction against all protests (a move that was later declared illegal by an appeals court), made dozens of arrests, and increased bail for jailed demonstrators, thereby keeping many of them from posting it. Eventually even Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested
Connor’s aim was to quash the demonstrations by eventually throwing all of Shuttlesworth’s followers behind bars. But the strategy backfired, because black high school students began taking their place in the streets and at the lunch counters. Connor, enraged at the youngsters’ participation, turned attack dogs and fire hoses against them and arrested so many that the city jails were filled to overflowing. Film crews from television networks recorded the brutal confrontations. When the scenes were aired, the nation was horrified, costing Birmingham’s segregationists sympathy and support. Finally some of the city’s leading businessmen, worried that the bad press was damaging Birmingham’s reputation, insisted on negotiating with the protesters. By July 1963, most of Birmingham’s segregation ordinances were gone. So was Bull Connor. Shuttlesworth’s Project C had succeeded, showing that nonviolent direct action worked if enough people were willing to take risks in opposing injustice.
19 March
Vera Brittain
29 December 1893—29 March 1970
Never the Same Person Again
Youth should be a time of exuberance, love, and anticipation. But for those generations whose youth is blighted by war—for the god of war especially devours the young—it becomes a time of despair. Killed on the battlefield or spiritually wounded back home, the youths who endure war are all victims of it.
One of the most gripping accounts of how war especially ruins the young is Vera Brittain’s 1933 Testament of Youth, a memoir of World War I. Vera and her only brother, Edward, grew up in a comfortable middle-class household. Like so many other members of their generation, they were patriotically enthusiastic when war erupted between the European powers in 1914. Edward and all his chums immediately enlisted in the army. Vera, regretting that she couldn’t follow them as a soldier, soon dropped out of university to train as a nurse. During the war years she served at military hospitals in London, Malta, and France.
It didn’t take long for Vera’s initial support for the war to sour. As she treated soldiers maimed by bullet and shell or burned by poison gas—her descriptions of their wounds are both ghastly and heartbreaking—she came to realize that her earlier notions of war had been romantic nonsense. After a particularly grueling night nursing gas-poisoned soldiers, she wrote, “I wish those people who write so glibly about this being a holy war, and the orators who talk so much about going on no matter how long the war lasts and what it may mean, could see a case.” She sensed that the harsh reality of war was changing her. “I feel I shall never be the same person again,” she confessed, “and wonder if, when the war does end, I shall have forgotten how to laugh. One day last week I came away from a really terrible amputation dressing I had been assisting at—it was the first after the operation—with my hands covered with blood and my mind full of a passionate fury at the wickedness of war, and I wished I had never been born.”
This was written in 1915, scarcely a year into the war. By the time the fighting finally ceased three years later, Vera had lost, one by one, her fiancé, her beloved brother, and three of her childhood friends. Her Testament of Youth was an effort to come to terms with the disaster that had befallen her and her generation, and that had robbed them of their youth.
After the war, Vera returned to university. She studied history in the hopes of understanding “how the whole calamity of the war had happened, to know why it had been possible for me and my contemporaries, through our own ignorance and others’ ingenuity, to be used, hypnotized and slaughtered.” She became a leading figure in the pacifist and feminist movements in England, wrote books, and acquired fame. But she never ceased mourning the lives—her own included, perhaps—that the war had consumed.
20 March
John Middleton Murry
6 August 1889—12 March 1957
Adelphi Center Founder
Not all advocates of peace lead peaceful personal lives. Despite their admirable public work for nonviolence, they never quite seem to achieve a harmony or equilibrium in their private affairs. Such a one was the author John Middleton Murry.
Although largely forgotten today, Murry was one of the most prolific British authors of his generation, writing nearly sixty well-received books and hundreds of essays. He was married four times—one of his wives was the writer Katherine Mansfield; had numerous love affairs (the primary reason his marriages didn’t last); and went through any number of ideological phases. At one time or another, he embraced Christianity (he even thought for a while of becoming an Anglican priest), Marxism, pacifism, and anti-Soviet militarism. But despite his unsettled private life and his leapfrogging from one cause to the next, he was a leading British pacifist in the 1930s. His most significant achievement was the founding of the Adelphi Center, intended, as he wrote, to be “a meeting place for pacifists of all ages who believe there is a need for co-ordinated effort to realize pacifism as a way of life.”
Founded in 1934, Adelphi was envisioned as a nonsectarian experiment in communal living in which participants would practice nonviolence, pool resources, and together create an alternative to the going capitalism model. In his 1937 The Necessity of Pacifism, Murry argued that capitalism is “a social morality, an all-pervading spiritual atmosphere—nothing less, indeed, than a total life-mode,” and that therefore reformist tinkering with it would do little to bring about fundamental change. What was needed, he believed, was the living example of a distinctly different “life-mode,” and his hope was that the Adelphi Center would be just that.
The Center consisted of a large house situated