(Re-)Dressing the KKK: Fred Shuttlesworth's Precept Hermeneutic and the Rhetoric of African American Prophetic Patriotism

In: Journal of black studies, Volume 42, Issue 5, p. 811-827

Abstract

This article focuses on Fred Shuttlesworth, founder and president of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and the one who convinced Martin Luther King Jr. to participate in the Birmingham civil rights campaign of 1963. A folksy preacher and an exceptional leader, the article examines his use of the precept hermeneutic in his rhetoric. Like King, Shuttlesworth falls within the African American jeremiad tradition of David Walker, Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth. Unlike King, the author argues, Shuttlesworth utilizes the precept hermeneutic to repudiate segregation but not simply because of his fundamentalist worldview; he deployed this form of exegesis to foreground larger principles of progressive patriotism, religious activism, and racial egalitarianism. As a result, Shuttlesworth constructs a rhetorical strategy that, drawing upon a canonized view of scripture, paradoxically deconstructs, disrupts, and dismantles canonized perspectives on racial, religious, national and international identities.