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ICYMI: Eric Holder Accepts the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award

Washington, D.C. — As reported by the Birmingham Times, Eric H. Holder, Jr., the 82nd Attorney General of the United States and Chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee (NDRC), delivered a speech yesterday after accepting the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham, Alabama.

In his speech, Attorney General Holder discussed Reverend Shuttlesworth’s legacy and how it inspires Americans to take a stand against the escalating attacks on democracy and fundamental rights coming from the Trump administration.

The full speech, as prepared for delivery, is below: 

The Honorable Eric H. Holder, Jr.

82nd Attorney General of the United States

Accepting the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth Award

Remarks As Prepared For Delivery

December 11, 2025

Thank you for that generous introduction—and thank you all so much for welcoming me back to Birmingham.

To accept an award bearing the name of the great Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth—one of my personal heroes—is truly a profound and humbling honor. He was a warrior for justice… a champion for civil rights… a singular leader who helped to tear down the machinery of American apartheid so that generations to come could finally walk in freedom.

To be recognized by this organization, which carries forward his legacy, is an extraordinary privilege. You understand, as Reverend Shuttlesworth did, that justice does not arrive in this world unbidden. It must be insisted upon, fought for, defended every single day.

That’s why, as grateful as I am for this honor, I am even more grateful for your ongoing work—in the name of Reverend Shuttlesworth and so many others, and in the spirit of unyielding courage and determination that brings us together this evening.

For it is this same spirit—and the same clarity of purpose that defined this award’s namesake all his life—that must guide us today. Because now, as in Reverend Shuttlesworth’s time, our nation stands at an inflection point: one of those rare moments when history tests not our rhetoric, but our resolve.

The defining question of our time is whether we will advance the work of justice—or allow fear and fatigue to induce us to surrender it to those who would turn back the clock. Whether we help bend this nation closer to its stated ideals—or permit others to drag it back into the same old patterns of exclusion and control.

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We cannot deny the progress this country has made since the days when Reverend Shuttlesworth organized, right here in this city. To pretend nothing has changed would be to dismiss and dishonor the sacrifices of those who faced bullets, dogs and fire hoses in order that doors might open a little wider for us than for them.

But neither can we indulge the comforting fiction that a moral universe moves inherently towards justice as Dr. King stated. That arc does not bend by itself. It has always required – as it does now – action to pull it in that direction.

All around us, hard-won victories are being tested—and turned back—by coordinated efforts to slow, stall, and reverse the gains for which Shuttlesworth, King, Lewis, Nash, Evers and so many others risked all they had.

The poll tax and Jim Crow and Bull Connor may be long buried, but their descendants are very much alive. The tools have changed—extreme racial and partisan gerrymanders, precision voter suppression, disinformation to keep people home on Election Day, the normalization of election denial—but the intent and effect is the same: to decide who counts in this democracy, and who does not.

What we are experiencing today is not the ordinary turbulence of American politics. It is a deliberate strategy: to concentrate power, to narrow the meaning of citizenship, to curtail the rights of those who dare to stand up for truth and justice, and to make government responsive only to those few who already possess influence, already possess vast resources and already possess immense power.

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We have to speak plainly about the project now underway—a well-organized movement, clothed in the full powers of the Executive Branch, that is aimed at weakening democratic guardrails… shrinking civil rights protections… unmooring our national commitments and social compacts from the people they were written to serve.

We see this in brazen attacks on voting rights and access to the ballot box. In cartoonishly gerrymandered maps that carve up communities of color to dilute their strength. In attempts to criminalize protest and chill dissent. In campaigns to undermine public confidence in elections and the institutions that safeguard them. In efforts to erase Black history, which never forget is American history, and scrub classrooms and textbooks of those shameful things that Fred Shuttlesworth helped the nation overcome.

Some, who are either naive or nefarious, will say this is just politics as usual. But we know it is far more sinister than that.

It’s about who gets to belong in this country—and who is excluded, pushed to the margins, told to wait their turn. A turn that never comes. Or even arrested by masked men, with shocking violence and no due process, for deportation to countries that so many have never ever known.

It is, in other words, nothing less than a concerted effort to rewrite the rules of participation so that a narrow ideological minority can govern without the consent of the many.

And perhaps the most dangerous part is not the brazenness of these efforts—though that should alarm every one of us. The most dangerous part is the temptation so many of us feel, in the face of all this, to look away. To decide that the noise and chaos is too much. To shrug and say the system is too broken to fix. To say that we have done our part, the rest is on them.

That temptation is deadly. Because the very instant we decide that nothing we do matters, those who stand in opposition to equality and justice have already won.

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Now, whenever the challenges of this moment feel particularly heavy… I invite you to imagine how heavy they must have felt to people like Fred Shuttlesworth, here in Birmingham, at the height of what we now call the Civil Rights Era.

Imagine walking out the front doors of this building and into a city where the law itself was an instrument of terror. Where the Police Chief himself promised—to your face—you would not live out the year.

Imagine a daily reality where the routine tools of government were not subpoenas and summonses, but fire hoses, nightsticks, bombings, and mobs. Not for a summer, not for a season, but year after year after year.

Yet Fred Shuttlesworth, Medgar Evers, John Lewis, Diane Nash, the Freedom Riders, and so many others—Black and white, women and men, many of them people of faith, many of them lawyers or future lawyers, so many so called “ordinary” citizens—rose up to confront this state-sanctioned regime of violence and humiliation.

They had every rational reason to doubt that change on the scale they demanded was even possible. They had every reason to assume the system would break them before they could ever hope to bend it. And more than a few of them, of course, knew they would not live to see the Promised Land.

But they marched anyway.

They organized anyway.

They got knocked down and stood back up anyway.

And because they did—because they refused to surrender their dignity or their hope, because they took action—they changed the course of the 20th century.

If these ordinary, extraordinary people could summon that courage in the face of billy clubs and bombs, then we have no excuse. None.

Complacency is not an option. Cynicism is not an option. Silence is not an option. Capitulation is not an option.

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Every generation reaches a point where it must decide what kind of nation we will hand to the next. That moment has arrived yet again.

And the responsibility does not fall on lawyers alone, or activists alone, or public servants alone.

It falls on all who still believe in one simple, radical idea: the proposition of equality and justice under law.

Now, I know this may seem daunting. It is only human to hope for a miracle—or imagine that someone else, from somewhere else, will step in and set things right.

But let me speak plainly tonight:

There is no cavalry coming over the hill. We are the cavalry.

The heroes who will defend democracy in this new century are not mythical figures. Some of them are in this room tonight as we speak.

They are the neighbors who refuse intimidation at the polls. The organizers who knock on just one more door, and then another. The citizens who refuse to surrender their dignity, their voice, or their belief in this country—their faith that our future can still be better than our past.

We owe a debt to all those who blazed the trail now before us—Chaney, Schwerner, Goodman, Lewis, Hamer, Shuttlesworth. It would dishonor their sacrifice if we failed to use the power and enfranchisement their legacies bestow.

And we owe an equal debt to those who will follow: to our children, and theirs, who will live with the consequences of what we choose—or fail—to do right now.

The question before us is not complicated. It boils down to this:

Will we fight for our democracy with the same conviction that our forebears brought to this struggle? Or will we let fatigue, fear, and frustration give success to the work of those who want to turn back the clock?

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Reverend Shuttlesworth left us many lessons, over the course of his remarkable and well-lived life. But in my view, there is one story that captures him best.

On Christmas night in 1956, the Klan placed sixteen sticks of dynamite near his home… and lit the fuses. The blast blew the supports out from under his bedroom and hurled him into the air. Windows shattered. Walls buckled. By any reasonable measure, he should have died.

The local police soon arrived to find Reverend Shuttlesworth standing amid the wreckage. One officer warned him to leave town quickly. But he replied:

“You go back and tell your Klan brethren: I wasn’t raised to run. If God could keep me through this, then I’m here for the duration.”

The very next morning, he walked into a mass meeting and announced that a Freedom Ride–style challenge to Birmingham’s segregated bus system would proceed as planned. There would be no backing down. Demonstrable strength in the face of determined adversity.

Tonight, we gather in honor of Fred Shuttlesworth not because he survived the blast, but because he refused to let terror dictate the course of his life and the future of his community and ultimately our country. His lack of fear and commitment to the cause must be our guides in this troubling time. Because he believed—deep in his bones—that ordinary people, standing together with purpose and discipline, could do extraordinary things.

If this moment demands anything, it demands these very same qualities:

A generation willing to stand firm.

A people willing to stand up and be counted.

A community willing to say—with the quiet force of conviction—that no matter what you throw at us…

We are here for the duration.

We will not waver in our pursuit of liberty and equal justice for all.

We will not bend in our defense of dignity and freedom.

We will not abandon the long struggle for justice, equality, truth, and the full promise of American democracy—even against those who would take us back to the darkest moments in our history.

We will fight for a more fair, more just nation.

We are here for the duration.

This is how we honor Reverend Shuttlesworth’s memory.

This is how we repay the unpayable debt we owe to those who walked before us.

And this is how we secure a brighter future for all who will follow.

By meeting this moment with courage… discipline… and the steady refrain of those who know exactly what is required:

We are here for the duration.

May God bless our journey, and the memory of the man who inspires our every step.

May God bless this city, this state, and this nation.

And may God bless each and every one of you.

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