Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights

The Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) was a Civil Rights organization in Birmingham, Alabama, United States, which coordinated boycotts and sponsored federal lawsuits aimed at dismantling segregation in Birmingham and Alabama through the 1950s and 1960s. Fred Shuttlesworth, pastor of Bethel Baptist Church, served as president of the group from its founding in 1956 until 1969. The ACMHR's crowning moment came during the pivotal Birmingham Campaign which it coordinated along with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during the Spring of 1963.

Shuttlesworth, the fiery pastor who took over the pulpit of Bethel Baptist Church in 1953, was already a leading figure in the Birmingham movement. He had led an unsuccessful campaign to convince the Birmingham Police Department to hire black officers and accompanied Autherine Lucy and Arthur Shores in the short-lived integration of the University of Alabama. He was membership chairman for the Alabama chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and was the featured speaker in a January 1956 "Emancipation Rally" sponsored by the NAACP.

Later that spring Alabama Attorney General John Patterson successfully headed efforts to ban the NAACP from conducting activities in Alabama. As a result, Shuttlesworth led a group of 11 pastors and laymen who met at A. G. Gaston's Smith & Gaston Funeral Chapel to outline the creation of a group of "free and independent Citizens of the United States of America, and of the State of Alabama" who would "express publicly our determination to press forward persistently for Freedom and Democracy, and the removal from our society any forms of Second Class Citizenship." The group met on June 4, 1956, and drafted a 7-point "Declaration of Principles":

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