‘The movement was God’s movement’: An interview with Bishop Calvin Woods

By: Joseph Allen

Bishop Calvin Woods will celebrate his 90th birthday in September. One of the most vocal local activists during the civil rights struggles in Birmingham in the 1950s and 1960s, Woods is former pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church in Norwood and a former president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Birmingham chapter.

The younger brother of the late Rev. Abraham Woods Jr., another civil rights pioneer in Birmingham, the two siblings joined with the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth to help found the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) in 1956, after the NAACP was officially banned from operating in the state. Later that year, Woods was arrested for advocating a boycott of Birmingham’s segregated bus system. He was fined and sentenced to prison for six months. He would be arrested again in 1963 for taking an active role in the protests that year that ultimately led to the abolishment of the legal system of racial apartheid in Birmingham.

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