A sea of students flood into the theater, and wait for the speeches to begin. Stewart Jacoby, AP US history and psychology teacher, starts to speak on stage. He talks about how his wife, Rita Jacoby, and Sephira Shuttlesworth, one of the speakers, are best friends.    

Shuttlesworth came to speak about the civil rights movement on Wednesday Feb. 13; telling about her life first then her husband’s .
                                                                                                                                                                                                At age 6 Shuttlesworth witnessed police dogs and fire hoses turned on innocent people ranging from 12 to 18 years old for a peaceful protest and wondered how people could be so hateful towards one another. As she grew, so did her understanding of the hateful world around her. She knew she wanted to be a teacher by the age of 8. She also knew if she wanted a quality education a “white” school was the place to obtain it. “Times got tough, but it was our decision. We took names, threats, everything,” she said.

“The story of her life was inspiring to me,” sophomore Eugene Parrish said. “I remember she said, ‘Work for a cause, not applause,’ and that really stuck with me. It makes me want even more to be successful in life.”

Sephira Shuttlesworth was the wife of Fred Shuttlesworth, who worked in the civil rights movement alongside Martin Luther King Jr. Shuttlesworth talked about her and her husband’s lives.

“When he got an idea… and he set his mind to it you couldn’t sway him,” Shuttlesworth said.

There was also a lunch where a few chosen students had the chance to have lunch with Shuttlesworth. Here students got time to talk to her in a more one-on-one conversation. Sophomore James Lee attended this lunch and was able to speak to her.

“We’ve progressed a lot and it gives me the motivation to work harder,” Lee said.

Fred died on Oct. 5, 2011, and Sephira feels it’s her responsibility to share his legacy.

“The struggle for African Americans has been very difficult despite adversity, but people like her husband who commit and sacrifice (create change),” Audrey Weir-Graham, world history teacher, said.

Shuttlesworth helped start Project Confrontation. Project C was an aggregate of cautiously planned protests with strategies ranging from sit-ins to mass marches to boycotts. People who were against Shuttlesworth called him as a notorious criminal and crook. He knew that the Ku Klux Klan tried to kill him at least 12 times. In fact, he didn’t think he would live to be 40. Shuttlesworth’s church in Birmingham, Ala., was bombed over 50 times. For a while, Birmingham was actually nicknamed Bombingham.

“Her speech was inspirational and made me realize that the civil rights movement wasn’t that long ago,”senior Charnay Brown-Thomas said. “I think we’ve come a long way; we still have some racial issues, but they remind us of where we come from and to not repeat history.”

Another person that spoke that day was Jesse Nabors, a retired administrator that comes back to help with the S3 grant. He grew up in the time of the civil rights movement and learned how to read by matching pictures with words. He worked hard in school and “was blessed to be one student not beaten or thrown into jail,” he said. “But I was always one of those numbers.”

He showed students a book from his grade school that basically said “colored people” were inferior and that they liked to work in the hot sun because they couldn’t handle the cold. This book gives him inspiration and he said, “you’re not going to tell me what I can’t do. We can do this, but it’s on you.”