Issue: Summer 2012 | Posted: June 18, 2012
1050 U.U. Drive
Shuttlesworth keynotes Black History Month program
Sephira Bailey Shuttlesworth (’79) married one of the “big three” civil rights leaders in 2006.
Her late husband Fred Shuttlesworth was on the front lines of the struggle for racial equality in the 1960s, alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ralph Abernathy.
Mrs. Shuttlesworth now shares stories of her late husband’s work at that time as she travels to speaking engagements across the country, including a stop in February at her alma mater to address Union’s fifth annual Black History Month program.
But Shuttlesworth also has stories of her own struggle to share.
The Jackson native grew up in a time when West Tennessee was racially segregated. Shuttlesworth and two siblings were the first African-American students to attend Pope Elementary School.
Shuttlesworth told a capacity crowd in the Grant Events Center that following passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964), her mother presented the possibility of attending all-white Pope Elementary in the fall of 1965. Although she and two of her siblings quickly agreed to attend Pope, she says they had no idea what they were about to face.
“We just knew if Pope Elementary School was that nice on the outside, it had to be beautiful on the inside,” she said. “We were like innocent lambs headed for the slaughter.”
Shuttlesworth said that she went through the first year at Pope with no friends. Her second year, she had one friend who was harassed by other students for associating with a black student. But she said in her third year she began to be accepted, largely because she excelled in the classroom and in athletics.
A few years later, she continued to pursue racial reconciliation at Union, where she studied music and took part in a wide range of campus activities. She said her time at the university, though not free of discrimination, continued to develop her into a Christian who had a “heart for service” and taught her to ask the important questions in life.
She said part of that service is to recount the stories of peaceful protest that both she and her late husband lived more than a generation ago. She encouraged her audience to take advantage of similar opportunities.
“You too owe it to the rest of the world to explain how God chose you, anointed you, led you and carried you through.”