Re: Breaking News: Steve Jobs has Passed away
yo...shit was here way before CNN posted it
yo...shit was here way before CNN posted it
Merged: Steve Jobs has Passed away
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Re: Steve Jobs Has Passed Away
Breaking News: Steve Jobs has died!
http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/05/us/obit-steve-jobs/index.html?iref=BN1&hpt=hp_t1
Steve Jobs, Apple founder, dies
By Brandon Griggs, CNN
updated 7:52 PM EST, Wed October 5, 2011
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Jobs had battled cancer for years
Jobs founded Apple when he was 21
He developed the concept of the personal computer and mouse
He oversaw the launch of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad
(CNN) -- Steve Jobs, the visionary in the black turtleneck who co-founded Apple in a Silicon Valley garage, built it into the world's leading tech company and led a mobile-computing revolution with wildly popular devices such as the iPhone, died Wednesday. He was 56.
The hard-driving executive pioneered the concept of the personal computer and of navigating them by clicking onscreen images with a mouse. In more recent years, he introduced the iPod portable music player, the iPhone and the iPad tablet -- all of which changed how we consume content in the digital age.
More than one pundit, praising Jobs' ability to transform entire industries with his inventions, called him a modern-day Leonardo Da Vinci.
"Steve Jobs is one of the great innovators in the history of modern capitalism," New York Times columnist Joe Nocera said in August. "His intuition has been phenomenal over the years."
Jobs' death, while dreaded by Apple's legions of fans, was not unexpected. He had battled cancer for years, took a medical leave from Apple in January and stepped down as chief executive in August because he could "no longer meet (his) duties and expectations."
Born February 24, 1955, and then adopted, Jobs grew up in Cupertino, California -- which would become home to Apple's headquarters -- and showed an early interest in electronics. As a teenager, he phoned William Hewlett, president of Hewlett-Packard, to request parts for a school project. He got them, along with an offer of a summer job at HP.
Jobs dropped out of Oregon's Reed College after one semester, although he returned to audit a class in calligraphy, which he says influenced Apple's graceful, minimalist aesthetic. He quit one of his first jobs, designing video games for Atari, to backpack across India and take psychedelic drugs. Those experiences, Jobs said later, shaped his creative vision.
"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future," he told Stanford University graduates during a commencement speech in 2005. "You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."
While at HP, Jobs befriended Steve Wozniak, who impressed him with his skill at assembling electronic components. The two later joined a Silicon Valley computer hobbyists club, and when he was 21, Jobs teamed with Wozniak and two other men to launch Apple Computer Inc.
It's long been Silicon Valley legend: Jobs and Wozniak built their first commercial product, the Apple 1, in Jobs' parents' garage in 1976. Jobs sold his Volkswagen van to help finance the venture. The primitive computer, priced at $666.66, had no keyboard or display, and customers had to assemble it themselves.
The following year, Apple unveiled the Apple II computer at the inaugural West Coast Computer Faire. The machine was a hit, and the personal computing revolution was under way.
Jobs was among the first computer engineers to recognize the appeal of the mouse and the graphical interface, which let users operate computers by clicking on images instead of writing text.
Apple's pioneering Macintosh computer launched in early 1984 with a now-iconic, Orwellian-themed Super Bowl ad. The boxy beige Macintosh sold well, but the demanding Jobs clashed frequently with colleagues, and in 1986, he was ousted from Apple after a power struggle.
Then came a 10-year hiatus during which he founded NeXT Computer, whose pricey, cube-shaped computer workstations never caught on with consumers.
Jobs had more success when he bought Pixar Animation Studios from George Lucas before the company made it big with "Toy Story." Jobs brought the same marketing skill to Pixar that he became known for at Apple. His brief but emotional pitch for "Finding Nemo," for example, was a masterful bit of succinct storytelling.
In 1996, Apple bought NeXT, returning Jobs to the then-struggling company he had co-founded. Within a year, he was running Apple again -- older and perhaps wiser but no less of a perfectionist. And in 2001, he took the stage to introduce the original iPod, the little white device that transformed portable music and kick-started Apple's furious comeback.
Thus began one of the most remarkable second acts in the history of business. Over the next decade, Jobs wowed launch-event audiences, and consumers, with one game-changing hit after another: iTunes (2003), the iPhone (2007), the App Store (2008), and the iPad (2010).
Observers marveled at Jobs' skills as a pitchman, his ability to inspire godlike devotion among Apple "fanboys" (and scorn from PC fans) and his "one more thing" surprise announcements. Time after time, he sold people on a product they didn't know they needed until he invented it. And all this on an official annual salary of $1.
He also built a reputation as a hard-driving, mercurial and sometimes difficult boss who oversaw almost every detail of Apple's products and rejected prototypes that didn't meet his exacting standards.
By the late 2000s, his once-renegade tech company, the David to Microsoft's Goliath, was entrenched at the uppermost tier of American business. Apple now operates more than 300 retail stores in 11 countries. The company has sold more than 275 million iPods, 100 million iPhones and 25 million iPads worldwide.
Jobs' climb to the top was complete in summer 2011, when Apple listed more cash reserves than the U.S. Treasury and even briefly surpassed Exxon Mobil as the world's most valuable company.
But Jobs's health problems sometimes cast a shadow over his company's success. In 2004, he announced to his employees that he was being treated for pancreatic cancer. He lost weight and appeared unusually gaunt at keynote speeches to Apple developers, spurring concerns about his health and fluctuations in the company's stock price. One wire service accidentally published Jobs' obituary.
Jobs had a secret liver transplant in 2009 in Tennessee during a six-month medical leave of absence from Apple. He took another medical leave in January this year. Perhaps mindful of his legacy, he cooperated on his first authorized biography, scheduled to be published by Simon & Schuster in November.
Jobs is survived by his wife of 20 years, Laurene, and four children, including one from a prior relationship.
He always spoke with immense pride about what he and his engineers accomplished at Apple.
"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do," he told the Stanford grads in 2005.
"If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on."
http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/05/us/obit-steve-jobs/index.html?iref=BN1&hpt=hp_t1
Steve Jobs, Apple founder, dies
By Brandon Griggs, CNN
updated 7:52 PM EST, Wed October 5, 2011
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Jobs had battled cancer for years
Jobs founded Apple when he was 21
He developed the concept of the personal computer and mouse
He oversaw the launch of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad
(CNN) -- Steve Jobs, the visionary in the black turtleneck who co-founded Apple in a Silicon Valley garage, built it into the world's leading tech company and led a mobile-computing revolution with wildly popular devices such as the iPhone, died Wednesday. He was 56.
The hard-driving executive pioneered the concept of the personal computer and of navigating them by clicking onscreen images with a mouse. In more recent years, he introduced the iPod portable music player, the iPhone and the iPad tablet -- all of which changed how we consume content in the digital age.
More than one pundit, praising Jobs' ability to transform entire industries with his inventions, called him a modern-day Leonardo Da Vinci.
"Steve Jobs is one of the great innovators in the history of modern capitalism," New York Times columnist Joe Nocera said in August. "His intuition has been phenomenal over the years."
Jobs' death, while dreaded by Apple's legions of fans, was not unexpected. He had battled cancer for years, took a medical leave from Apple in January and stepped down as chief executive in August because he could "no longer meet (his) duties and expectations."
Born February 24, 1955, and then adopted, Jobs grew up in Cupertino, California -- which would become home to Apple's headquarters -- and showed an early interest in electronics. As a teenager, he phoned William Hewlett, president of Hewlett-Packard, to request parts for a school project. He got them, along with an offer of a summer job at HP.
Jobs dropped out of Oregon's Reed College after one semester, although he returned to audit a class in calligraphy, which he says influenced Apple's graceful, minimalist aesthetic. He quit one of his first jobs, designing video games for Atari, to backpack across India and take psychedelic drugs. Those experiences, Jobs said later, shaped his creative vision.
"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future," he told Stanford University graduates during a commencement speech in 2005. "You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."
While at HP, Jobs befriended Steve Wozniak, who impressed him with his skill at assembling electronic components. The two later joined a Silicon Valley computer hobbyists club, and when he was 21, Jobs teamed with Wozniak and two other men to launch Apple Computer Inc.
It's long been Silicon Valley legend: Jobs and Wozniak built their first commercial product, the Apple 1, in Jobs' parents' garage in 1976. Jobs sold his Volkswagen van to help finance the venture. The primitive computer, priced at $666.66, had no keyboard or display, and customers had to assemble it themselves.
The following year, Apple unveiled the Apple II computer at the inaugural West Coast Computer Faire. The machine was a hit, and the personal computing revolution was under way.
Jobs was among the first computer engineers to recognize the appeal of the mouse and the graphical interface, which let users operate computers by clicking on images instead of writing text.
Apple's pioneering Macintosh computer launched in early 1984 with a now-iconic, Orwellian-themed Super Bowl ad. The boxy beige Macintosh sold well, but the demanding Jobs clashed frequently with colleagues, and in 1986, he was ousted from Apple after a power struggle.
Then came a 10-year hiatus during which he founded NeXT Computer, whose pricey, cube-shaped computer workstations never caught on with consumers.
Jobs had more success when he bought Pixar Animation Studios from George Lucas before the company made it big with "Toy Story." Jobs brought the same marketing skill to Pixar that he became known for at Apple. His brief but emotional pitch for "Finding Nemo," for example, was a masterful bit of succinct storytelling.
In 1996, Apple bought NeXT, returning Jobs to the then-struggling company he had co-founded. Within a year, he was running Apple again -- older and perhaps wiser but no less of a perfectionist. And in 2001, he took the stage to introduce the original iPod, the little white device that transformed portable music and kick-started Apple's furious comeback.
Thus began one of the most remarkable second acts in the history of business. Over the next decade, Jobs wowed launch-event audiences, and consumers, with one game-changing hit after another: iTunes (2003), the iPhone (2007), the App Store (2008), and the iPad (2010).
Observers marveled at Jobs' skills as a pitchman, his ability to inspire godlike devotion among Apple "fanboys" (and scorn from PC fans) and his "one more thing" surprise announcements. Time after time, he sold people on a product they didn't know they needed until he invented it. And all this on an official annual salary of $1.
He also built a reputation as a hard-driving, mercurial and sometimes difficult boss who oversaw almost every detail of Apple's products and rejected prototypes that didn't meet his exacting standards.
By the late 2000s, his once-renegade tech company, the David to Microsoft's Goliath, was entrenched at the uppermost tier of American business. Apple now operates more than 300 retail stores in 11 countries. The company has sold more than 275 million iPods, 100 million iPhones and 25 million iPads worldwide.
Jobs' climb to the top was complete in summer 2011, when Apple listed more cash reserves than the U.S. Treasury and even briefly surpassed Exxon Mobil as the world's most valuable company.
But Jobs's health problems sometimes cast a shadow over his company's success. In 2004, he announced to his employees that he was being treated for pancreatic cancer. He lost weight and appeared unusually gaunt at keynote speeches to Apple developers, spurring concerns about his health and fluctuations in the company's stock price. One wire service accidentally published Jobs' obituary.
Jobs had a secret liver transplant in 2009 in Tennessee during a six-month medical leave of absence from Apple. He took another medical leave in January this year. Perhaps mindful of his legacy, he cooperated on his first authorized biography, scheduled to be published by Simon & Schuster in November.
Jobs is survived by his wife of 20 years, Laurene, and four children, including one from a prior relationship.
He always spoke with immense pride about what he and his engineers accomplished at Apple.
"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do," he told the Stanford grads in 2005.
"If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on."
Two days after he resigned.
Damn I hope that was photoshopped. Smh
Sent from my Asus Transformer in collaboration with Skynet
Re: Breaking News: Steve Jobs has Passed away
This nicca!
He's gonna be buried in this:
This nicca!
Re: Steve Jobs Has Passed Away
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Apple-says-company-cofounder-apf-2413458028.html?x=0
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Apple-says-company-cofounder-apf-2413458028.html?x=0
Re: Breaking News: Steve Jobs has Passed away
BLACK Civil rights ICON does...BGOL mods dont bother to sticky
JEWISH cac dies...well, BGOL sticks the thread
self hate is just too much in here
BLACK Civil rights ICON does...BGOL mods dont bother to sticky
JEWISH cac dies...well, BGOL sticks the thread
self hate is just too much in here
(((R.I.P))) Apple Chief Steve Jobs Dies!!!
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/steve-jobs-apple-ceo-dies/story?id=14383813
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/steve-jobs-apple-ceo-dies/story?id=14383813
Re: (((R.I.P))) Apple Chief Steve Jobs Dies!!!
Oh shit. R.I.P.
Oh shit. R.I.P.
Re: Breaking News: Steve Jobs has Passed away
SO not the time for this shit, when was the last time YOU made a difference in the WORLD?
SO not the time for this shit, when was the last time YOU made a difference in the WORLD?
Re: Breaking News: Steve Jobs has Passed away
Dan RIP
Dan RIP
Re: Breaking News: Steve Jobs has Passed away
He probably had one of those, "Farewell... Brother." moments.
LOL
Too soon though, but y'all wrong for that.
Dayum, can't stop laughing, but forreal, this is a sad day man...
He literally gave his life to that company. I know Bill Gates is sad as a mofo too
He probably had one of those, "Farewell... Brother." moments.
Re: Breaking News: Steve Jobs has Passed away
Its a fucking epidemic. 1 out of every 2 men and 1 out of every 3 women will get it. All our industry, new ways of making food etc. Our very society is increasing cancer. ISteve Jobs, a fucking billionaire genius couldn't beat it...cancer aint no joke.
Its a fucking epidemic. 1 out of every 2 men and 1 out of every 3 women will get it. All our industry, new ways of making food etc. Our very society is increasing cancer. ISteve Jobs, a fucking billionaire genius couldn't beat it...cancer aint no joke.
Apple confirms Steve Jobs has DIED...
Fox News reporting...
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/10/05/apple-says-founder-steve-jobs-is-dead/
Fox News reporting...
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/10/05/apple-says-founder-steve-jobs-is-dead/
Re: Breaking News: Steve Jobs has Passed away
RIP to Steve Jobs, but dude was a fucking dead beat dad, Globalist, piece of shit who had his products built in sweat shops for pennies and sold them to the masses for big bank. Don't understand why cats worship dude....
Typed on my MacBook.
RIP to Steve Jobs, but dude was a fucking dead beat dad, Globalist, piece of shit who had his products built in sweat shops for pennies and sold them to the masses for big bank. Don't understand why cats worship dude....
Typed on my MacBook.
Re: Breaking News: Steve Jobs has Passed away
REST IN PEACE
REST IN PEACE
Re: Breaking News: Steve Jobs has Passed away
Dam! Now we know why he stepped down. Must have been given the ol' "you got 6 months to live" notice by his doctors.
R.I.P. to one of the great innovators of the 21st century.
Jagi will be all tore up about this news.
Dam! Now we know why he stepped down. Must have been given the ol' "you got 6 months to live" notice by his doctors.
R.I.P. to one of the great innovators of the 21st century.
Jagi will be all tore up about this news.
Re: Breaking News: Steve Jobs has Passed away
you still mad you had to make a thread on how to operate your ipod
you still mad you had to make a thread on how to operate your ipod
Re: Breaking News: Steve Jobs has Passed away
damn shame... as much i didn't like his practices it's sad to see him go. i wonder what's gonna happen to apple now that his creative energy is gone. if its anything like yesterday apple is no longer apple and just another company... i mean they have a free iphone now... and last years model is 100 bucks. sad stuff.
divine must be on suicide watch now... bgol mods better be ready for a tranny attack...divine must be losing it at the moment.
damn shame... as much i didn't like his practices it's sad to see him go. i wonder what's gonna happen to apple now that his creative energy is gone. if its anything like yesterday apple is no longer apple and just another company... i mean they have a free iphone now... and last years model is 100 bucks. sad stuff.
divine must be on suicide watch now... bgol mods better be ready for a tranny attack...divine must be losing it at the moment.
Re: Breaking News: Steve Jobs has Passed away
The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, the civil rights icon hailed in his native Alabama as a "black Moses," died Wednesday. He was 89.
Described in a 1961 CBS documentary as "the man most feared by Southern racists," Shuttlesworth survived bombings, beatings, repeated jailings and other attacks — physical and financial — in his unyielding determination to heal the country's most enduring, divisive and volatile chasm.
"They were trying to blow me into heaven," Shuttlesworth, who spent most of his adult life in Cincinnati, said of those who violently opposed him in Birmingham and throughout the South. "But God wanted me on Earth."
"Daddy lived an incredible life and now he's at peace," said Patricia Shuttlesworth Massengill, his eldest daughter. Massengill, along with her sister Ruby Bester and their brother Fred Shuttlesworth Jr., traveled to Birmingham from Cincinnati on Tuesday and spent about three hours "praying and talking to" their father, whose once thundering voice was silenced several years ago by a stroke. Their other sibling, Carolyn Shuttlesworth, visited their father in a Birmingham hospice last week.
"He couldn't talk to us, but I hope he heard us," Massengill said. "I know he did."
Shuttlesworth's death removes a civil rights giant who remained a potent advocate for the downtrodden and needy of all colors for decades after he helped blacks secure, if not absolutely equal rights, at least more balanced treatment in a country that grudgingly granted those advances.
Before Rosa Parks refused to give up a bus seat in Montgomery, before four little girls were killed by a bomb at their church in Birmingham, before "Bloody Sunday" in Selma and even before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. became a household name, there was Shuttlesworth.
Although not as well known as King and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy— his compatriots in the civil rights movement's "Big Three" — Shuttlesworth brought the struggle into the living rooms of white America through a series of combustible showdowns with the Ku Klux Klan, Southern segregationists and Birmingham's infamous commissioner of public safety, Eugene "Bull" Connor.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2011-10-05/fred-shuttlesworth-dies/50667896/1?csp=34news
"A guest at Bull's house" — more commonly known as the Birmingham jail — on more than two dozen occasions, Shuttlesworth was viewed by King himself as the person who, because of his confrontational boldness and willingness to put himself in harm's way, was likely to become the movement's first major martyr.
"We're determined to either kill segregation or be killed by it," Shuttlesworth said in the 1961 CBS program. To achieve the goal, he nearly suffered the consequence, coming close to proving King's premonition true through numerous narrow escapes from death during the civil rights movement's most volatile and dangerous years.
He survived two bombings, one on Christmas Day 1956 when dynamite tossed from a passing car destroyed his parsonage beside Bethel Baptist Church, a small, narrow red-brick structure where he helped ignite "a fire you can't put out" that forever changed life not just in Birmingham and Alabama, but America.
Nine months later, he was savagely beaten by a white mob armed with bicycle chains and baseball bats in September 1957 when he tried to enroll his daughters at segregated Phillips High School. His wife also was stabbed and his daughter Ruby had her ankle crushed in their car door in that horrific attack.
When a bloodied Shuttlesworth was rushed to the hospital, doctors marveled that no bones had been broken and that he had not even sustained a concussion. "The Lord knew I live in a hard town, so he gave me a hard head," he said at the time.
His fiery personality and utter fearlessness were not diminished when Shuttlesworth moved to Cincinnati in 1961, lured by better pay and improved educational opportunities for his children. For much of the next half century, he essentially maintained dual residency, frequently returning to Alabama to help direct the epochal events unfolding there that were reshaping race relations nationwide.
Shuttlesworth was born Freddie Lee Robinson to Alberta Robinson, a 22-year-old unmarried woman in Mugler, Ala., on March 18, 1922. His father's name was Vetter Greene. The couple had a second child -- a girl named Cleola, Shuttlesworth's only full-blooded sibling.
While growing up in a strictly segregated community, Shuttlesworth did not have many opportunities to interact with whites and had shown no interest in civil rights activism. But while working at Brookley, one of his black co-workers was threatened with a pay cut. Shuttlesworth protested, marking the beginning of his advocacy for equal treatment. Later, his quest for civil rights would become intertwined with his Gospel ministry.
By the early 1950s, Shuttlesworth was back in Birmingham, serving as pastor of Bethel Baptist and playing a more visible role in the burgeoning civil rights movement. Emboldened by desegregation of buses in Baton Rouge, La., in 1953 and the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, he pressed his congregants register to vote, pushed the Birmingham City Council to hire more black police officers and traveled to Montgomery to support King's year-long bus boycott.
But while King was becoming the movement's national point man, historians and civil rights leaders agree that without Shuttlesworth, the movement's history might have been far different.
When Alabama's attorney general teamed up with a judge nicknamed "Injunctionitis Jones" to outlaw the NAACP in the state in 1956, Shuttlesworth founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights — an organization that, by directing the civil rights campaign in Alabama, significantly shaped the movement's national agenda over the next eight years.
Shuttlesworth, King, Abernathy and Bayard Rustin formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta in 1957 to assist local organizations to work for equality for African-Americans. Shuttlesworth helped coin its non-violent motto: "Not one hair of one head of one person should be harmed."
In 1960, the Rev. L. Venchael Booth, pastor of Zion Baptist Church in Cincinnati, invited Shuttlesworth to preach at the church. Booth later recommended Shuttlesworth to Revelation Baptist Church in Avondale, which needed a pastor. The congregation promptly elected him to the position, but he initially declined, prompting the congregation to step up its courtship.
With his wife, Ruby, also pressuring him to take the job because of the higher salary and better schools for their children, Shuttlesworth finally accepted the position on the condition that he could maintain his activism and involvement in Birmingham.
In both states, Shuttlesworth worked tirelessly to remove barriers that once made white workers' employment floor blacks' ceiling. During Shuttlesworth's 80th birthday celebration in Birmingham, then-Jefferson County Commissioner Steve Small stressed that "no elected official of color in this city, this nation, would be where they are today" if not for him.
"Fred Shuttlesworth, this great Moses, taught us not to bow," said the Rev. Abraham Lincoln Woods of Birmingham, who was with him during the vicious 1957 attack at Phillips High.
He was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at its 46th annual convention held in Jacksonville, Fla., in 2001 but he was replaced a year later.
Shuttlesworth's final years were marked by declining health and intra-family squabbles that produced headlines in Cincinnati and Birmingham, where he returned to and has lived since 2008.
He and his first wife, Ruby, divorced in 1970 and she died of a heart attack the following year. In 2006, one year after having a brain tumor removed, he married, at age 84, a longtime friend, Sephira Bailey, then 49.
Since then, Shuttlesworth's four children have occasionally clashed with their stepmother over her handling of his affairs.
When she moved Shuttlesworth back to Birmingham in 2008 for rehabilitation following a stroke that left him largely unable to speak, his children complained that they had been led to believe the move would be only a temporary one. There also were rifts over Sephira Shuttlesworth's solicitation of public contributions for her husband's medical care and burial spot, requests that the children felt damaged his image by inaccurately implying that he was destitute.
Those issues, however, will not undermine a brightly burning legacy beyond reproach. As Shuttlesworth himself said after surviving the Christmas 1956 bombing: "If God could save me from this, I'm here for the duration."
And he was.
The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, the civil rights icon hailed in his native Alabama as a "black Moses," died Wednesday. He was 89.
Described in a 1961 CBS documentary as "the man most feared by Southern racists," Shuttlesworth survived bombings, beatings, repeated jailings and other attacks — physical and financial — in his unyielding determination to heal the country's most enduring, divisive and volatile chasm.
"They were trying to blow me into heaven," Shuttlesworth, who spent most of his adult life in Cincinnati, said of those who violently opposed him in Birmingham and throughout the South. "But God wanted me on Earth."
"Daddy lived an incredible life and now he's at peace," said Patricia Shuttlesworth Massengill, his eldest daughter. Massengill, along with her sister Ruby Bester and their brother Fred Shuttlesworth Jr., traveled to Birmingham from Cincinnati on Tuesday and spent about three hours "praying and talking to" their father, whose once thundering voice was silenced several years ago by a stroke. Their other sibling, Carolyn Shuttlesworth, visited their father in a Birmingham hospice last week.
"He couldn't talk to us, but I hope he heard us," Massengill said. "I know he did."
Shuttlesworth's death removes a civil rights giant who remained a potent advocate for the downtrodden and needy of all colors for decades after he helped blacks secure, if not absolutely equal rights, at least more balanced treatment in a country that grudgingly granted those advances.
Before Rosa Parks refused to give up a bus seat in Montgomery, before four little girls were killed by a bomb at their church in Birmingham, before "Bloody Sunday" in Selma and even before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. became a household name, there was Shuttlesworth.
Although not as well known as King and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy— his compatriots in the civil rights movement's "Big Three" — Shuttlesworth brought the struggle into the living rooms of white America through a series of combustible showdowns with the Ku Klux Klan, Southern segregationists and Birmingham's infamous commissioner of public safety, Eugene "Bull" Connor.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2011-10-05/fred-shuttlesworth-dies/50667896/1?csp=34news
"A guest at Bull's house" — more commonly known as the Birmingham jail — on more than two dozen occasions, Shuttlesworth was viewed by King himself as the person who, because of his confrontational boldness and willingness to put himself in harm's way, was likely to become the movement's first major martyr.
"We're determined to either kill segregation or be killed by it," Shuttlesworth said in the 1961 CBS program. To achieve the goal, he nearly suffered the consequence, coming close to proving King's premonition true through numerous narrow escapes from death during the civil rights movement's most volatile and dangerous years.
He survived two bombings, one on Christmas Day 1956 when dynamite tossed from a passing car destroyed his parsonage beside Bethel Baptist Church, a small, narrow red-brick structure where he helped ignite "a fire you can't put out" that forever changed life not just in Birmingham and Alabama, but America.
Nine months later, he was savagely beaten by a white mob armed with bicycle chains and baseball bats in September 1957 when he tried to enroll his daughters at segregated Phillips High School. His wife also was stabbed and his daughter Ruby had her ankle crushed in their car door in that horrific attack.
When a bloodied Shuttlesworth was rushed to the hospital, doctors marveled that no bones had been broken and that he had not even sustained a concussion. "The Lord knew I live in a hard town, so he gave me a hard head," he said at the time.
His fiery personality and utter fearlessness were not diminished when Shuttlesworth moved to Cincinnati in 1961, lured by better pay and improved educational opportunities for his children. For much of the next half century, he essentially maintained dual residency, frequently returning to Alabama to help direct the epochal events unfolding there that were reshaping race relations nationwide.
Shuttlesworth was born Freddie Lee Robinson to Alberta Robinson, a 22-year-old unmarried woman in Mugler, Ala., on March 18, 1922. His father's name was Vetter Greene. The couple had a second child -- a girl named Cleola, Shuttlesworth's only full-blooded sibling.
While growing up in a strictly segregated community, Shuttlesworth did not have many opportunities to interact with whites and had shown no interest in civil rights activism. But while working at Brookley, one of his black co-workers was threatened with a pay cut. Shuttlesworth protested, marking the beginning of his advocacy for equal treatment. Later, his quest for civil rights would become intertwined with his Gospel ministry.
By the early 1950s, Shuttlesworth was back in Birmingham, serving as pastor of Bethel Baptist and playing a more visible role in the burgeoning civil rights movement. Emboldened by desegregation of buses in Baton Rouge, La., in 1953 and the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, he pressed his congregants register to vote, pushed the Birmingham City Council to hire more black police officers and traveled to Montgomery to support King's year-long bus boycott.
But while King was becoming the movement's national point man, historians and civil rights leaders agree that without Shuttlesworth, the movement's history might have been far different.
When Alabama's attorney general teamed up with a judge nicknamed "Injunctionitis Jones" to outlaw the NAACP in the state in 1956, Shuttlesworth founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights — an organization that, by directing the civil rights campaign in Alabama, significantly shaped the movement's national agenda over the next eight years.
Shuttlesworth, King, Abernathy and Bayard Rustin formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta in 1957 to assist local organizations to work for equality for African-Americans. Shuttlesworth helped coin its non-violent motto: "Not one hair of one head of one person should be harmed."
In 1960, the Rev. L. Venchael Booth, pastor of Zion Baptist Church in Cincinnati, invited Shuttlesworth to preach at the church. Booth later recommended Shuttlesworth to Revelation Baptist Church in Avondale, which needed a pastor. The congregation promptly elected him to the position, but he initially declined, prompting the congregation to step up its courtship.
With his wife, Ruby, also pressuring him to take the job because of the higher salary and better schools for their children, Shuttlesworth finally accepted the position on the condition that he could maintain his activism and involvement in Birmingham.
In both states, Shuttlesworth worked tirelessly to remove barriers that once made white workers' employment floor blacks' ceiling. During Shuttlesworth's 80th birthday celebration in Birmingham, then-Jefferson County Commissioner Steve Small stressed that "no elected official of color in this city, this nation, would be where they are today" if not for him.
"Fred Shuttlesworth, this great Moses, taught us not to bow," said the Rev. Abraham Lincoln Woods of Birmingham, who was with him during the vicious 1957 attack at Phillips High.
He was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at its 46th annual convention held in Jacksonville, Fla., in 2001 but he was replaced a year later.
Shuttlesworth's final years were marked by declining health and intra-family squabbles that produced headlines in Cincinnati and Birmingham, where he returned to and has lived since 2008.
He and his first wife, Ruby, divorced in 1970 and she died of a heart attack the following year. In 2006, one year after having a brain tumor removed, he married, at age 84, a longtime friend, Sephira Bailey, then 49.
Since then, Shuttlesworth's four children have occasionally clashed with their stepmother over her handling of his affairs.
When she moved Shuttlesworth back to Birmingham in 2008 for rehabilitation following a stroke that left him largely unable to speak, his children complained that they had been led to believe the move would be only a temporary one. There also were rifts over Sephira Shuttlesworth's solicitation of public contributions for her husband's medical care and burial spot, requests that the children felt damaged his image by inaccurately implying that he was destitute.
Those issues, however, will not undermine a brightly burning legacy beyond reproach. As Shuttlesworth himself said after surviving the Christmas 1956 bombing: "If God could save me from this, I'm here for the duration."
And he was.
Re: Breaking News: Steve Jobs has Passed away
@GAMETHEORY Dude, why are you trying to poison the thread w/ useless BS? It's sad that old dude died, it's sad that Troy Davis died, but ot's Steve Jobs moment in the spotlight. Show some respect.
@GAMETHEORY Dude, why are you trying to poison the thread w/ useless BS? It's sad that old dude died, it's sad that Troy Davis died, but ot's Steve Jobs moment in the spotlight. Show some respect.
Damn didn't he just present the new iOS/iPhone...damn man tomorrow ain't promised today
No that was Tim Cook, his replacement. Jobs stepped down in August.
Damn didn't he just present the new iOS/iPhone...damn man tomorrow ain't promised today
cac's do tend to look alike
Re: Breaking News: Steve Jobs has Passed away
Amazon, the Company That Ate the World
Jeff Bezos’ new tablet, the Kindle Fire, is cheap, pretty, and puts Amazon in perfect position to take a bite out of Apple—and every online transaction you make
Amazon, the Company That Ate the World
Jeff Bezos’ new tablet, the Kindle Fire, is cheap, pretty, and puts Amazon in perfect position to take a bite out of Apple—and every online transaction you make
Re: Breaking News: Steve Jobs has Passed away
It's bcuz he has a Touchpad
tell em why you mad son
It's bcuz he has a Touchpad
I ain't gonna lie, he wore the hell outta them Wrangler jeans, lol! He coulda switched to Lee at least once. Looking like he was wearing a male corset