The document summarizes the lives and civil rights work of Fred Shuttlesworth and Dan Warren in the 1960s. Shuttlesworth led desegregation efforts in Birmingham, Alabama, facing bombings and police violence but continuing to organize protests. In 1964, he led a "wade-in" at the whites-only beach in St. Augustine, Florida, pushing for desegregation. Dan Warren was a lawyer appointed as state attorney for Florida who prosecuted Shuttlesworth and MLK Jr. for trespassing but came to admire their work. Though initially unprepared for the violence in St. Augustine, Warren eventually helped protect protestors and ensured blacks could swim at the beach. Both men played

1. Dan Warren and Fred Shuttlesworth, fighters for desegregation in America’s South, died on
September 18th and October 5th respectively, aged 85 and 89
Oct 15th 2011 | from the print edition
THE golden beaches at St Augustine in Florida, America’s oldest city, stretch for 40 miles along the
Atlantic, sloping gently into the blue, lazy surf. They seem the last possible place for a battle. But in the
summer of 1964 the waves were full of Klansmen with wooden stakes and the beach beside the pier
heaving with helmeted police, as a line of blacks in bathing gear tried to desegregate with a “wade-in”
the warm, whites-only water.
Head of the Negro column, tall, lean, proud, unable to swim but not caring, flinging himself into the
ocean as he flung himself at everything else, was Fred Shuttlesworth. He was a Baptist pastor from
Birmingham, Alabama, loud with a country preacher’s whooping and singing as the Spirit took hold of
him, and fresh from turning that hard-coal, hard-heart city, the very cradle of segregation, into a model
of change. He’d led hundreds of blacks to ride at the front of the buses, sit-in at segregated lunch
counters, march through the streets, until city officials at last opened up the amenities to people of every
race. When his NAACP* chapter in Birmingham had been outlawed in 1956, he had come up instantly
with the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, which did just the same thing. He never
stopped organising the prophetic struggle, stoking the fire that no hoses or axes could put out, just as he
was doing now, pushing the white racists of St Augustine farther into the sea.
Watching him from the beach, deeply worried, was Dan Warren, the state attorney for the seventh
judicial circuit in Florida. His job, to which he had just been appointed by the governor, was to keep the
two sides apart and calm down the city, just now the most violent in America. On this day he had
ordered the police to see that the blacks were allowed to swim.
His career as a trial lawyer had taught him never to rise to provocation. Calm reason was his stock in
trade. Since arriving in the city from Daytona, he had meticulously kept a diary of everything he had
done. This included prosecuting both Mr Shuttlesworth and Martin Luther King for trespassing in the
whites-only restaurant of the Monson Motor Lodge, where half a dozen other blacks had jumped into the
pool and had acid poured on them by the owner. In court, though, Mr Warren had made a point of
shaking King’s hand, loudly saying how much he admired him; and even boasting that he had been in
the civil-rights movement longer than King had, trying to integrate services in his home town of
Greensboro, North Carolina.
Nothing, though, had truly prepared Mr Warren for St Augustine, where so many blacks had been
arrested for street marching that they overflowed the county jail. As long as marches had been legal he
had escorted them, and the sight of the marchers, weaving silently and in step through phalanxes (1) of
jeering (2) whites, made the hairs on his neck stand on end. It reminded him—for his most dangerous
action until then had been to join up, at 17, with a bomber squadron over Europe in 1943 —of vulnerable
aircraft flying into a hail of flak (3).
In Birmingham Mr Shuttlesworth knew that feeling all the time. He thrived on it. On Christmas Day 1956
his house had been dynamited under him, his mattress blown to pieces smaller than his fists, but under
the Lord’s everlasting arm he got no more than a bump on the head, and was hustling on the buses the
next day. He was beaten with chains when he tried to enroll his daughters in an all-white school, his
Bethel Church was bombed three times, and in 1963 police fire-hoses smashed him against a wall.
Again, God said: “Not yet.”

2. Darkness visible
He never protected himself, not with a gun, not even with a toothpick. He believed in confrontation, was
arrested 35 times, and was rougher in his ways and words than ever King was, always nagging the
leader to do more; he even alienated his own congregations, but he never dealt in violence. Prayer was
his armament. For Mr Warren the enemy was largely invisible, Klansmen carrying out attacks by night,
though he managed, for the first time, to prosecute a few. For Mr Shuttlesworth his nemesis was Bull
Connor, Birmingham’s commissioner of public safety, a low, rough, rasping man who used the Klan as
well as dogs and billy-clubs, and made the Darkness visible for all to see.
Where both men came closest was in their attitude to the law. When the Supreme Court in 1954
announced the desegregation of America’s schools Mr Shuttlesworth felt that he, the son of a
sharecropper (4), stood equal in rights with any man. He expected the law henceforth to represent him;
when he wanted an integrated police force, or access for blacks to the public parks, he sued the city of
Birmingham, and each time he failed he sued again. Mr Warren, as a Southern lawyer, was convinced
that America was a land of hypocrisy unless it protected black and white equally and alike. Both men
realised that flowery speeches and lofty court rulings meant nothing without action.
On July 1st 1964 the wade-ins and marches in St Augustine were called off. They had had their effect.
The next day, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. Among the catalysts were t wo men
who were hardly known outside their own cities; but who, one summer day, had gone down together to
the ocean.
*NAACP National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(1) Palanxes: a large group of people, animals, or things often placed close together
(2) To jeer: to shout insulting words at someone : to laugh at or criticize someone in a loud and angry
way
(3) Flak: exploding shells that are shot at enemy aircraft from guns on the ground.
(4) Sharecropper: a farmer especially in the southern U.S. who raises crops for the owner of a piece of
land and is paid a portion of the money from the sale of the crops
A. Find the words or expressions corresponding to the following definitions:
1. (verb) To take an oblique course / to lie or fall in a slant : incline.
2. (noun) The swell of the sea that breaks upon the shore.
3. (noun) A pointed piece of wood or other material driven or to be driven into the ground as a marker
or support.
4. (verb) To lift, raise / to cause to swell or rise.
5. (verb) To move in a brusque or headlong manner.
6. (phrasal verb) To grasp, grip, seize …
7. (noun) A bed for a baby usually on rockers or pivots and by extension: a place of origin.
8. (verb) Put a person or organization under a ban or restriction.
9. (noun) A long, usually rubber tube that liquids or gases can flow through
10. (verb) To choose (someone) to have a particular job : to give (someone) a position or duty.
11. (expression) Something that someone or something does or makes very well and often.
12. (verb) To bring legal action against for redress or punishment of a crime or violation of law.
13. (verb) An unlawful act committed on the person, property, or rights of another; especially : a
wrongful entry on real property.
14. (verb) To cover with or as if with water / to fill a space to capacity and spread beyond its limits
15. (phrasal verb) To do well in a situation in which you are given a particular type of treatment.
16. (verb) To move or work in a quick and energetic way.
17. (phrasal verb) To use or be involved in (something).
18. (noun) An opponent or enemy that is very difficult to defeat.
19. (adverb) From this time forward : starting now.
20. (Adjective) Very high and good : deserving to be admired.