Long-Lost Historic Photo Captured Civil Rights Pioneer Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth

Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, the civil rights pioneer who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King, Jr. and other ministers died today at age 89.

King once described Shuttlesworth as “the most courageous civil rights fighter in the South.” Among his many accomplishments, the Alabama minister helped organize the 1965 voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, which ended in a bloody confrontation on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma.

Shuttlesworth’s activism resulted in his May 1961 arrest for a Freedom Riders protest (along with reverends William Sloane Coffin, Ralph Abernathy, and Wyatt Tee Walker). Shuttlesworth’s mug shot from that arrest is seen above (click to enlarge).

The image was among more than 100 historic booking photos that were found several years ago in a Montgomery County Sheriff's Department storage room. The photos included mug shots of King and Rosa Parks taken during a Montgomery bus boycott in 1956.