A Fire You Can't Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham's Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth Book

This a great biography for anyone with an interest in the civil rights movement. Content is heavily factual, less thematic. This allows the reader to draw his or her own conclusions , but I often wished for more context. However, the book does a great service in disabusing the mythology that the movement was Dr. King and Dr. King was the movement. Despite the fact that this book was about a great man, it is a powerful argument against the "great man" theory of history. The civil rights movement was plural. It required instigators and leaders, like Fred Shuttlesworth, but it was many local movements in Birmingham, Nashville, Greenville, Selma, Montgomery.....with countless heroes.