Fred Shuttlesworth was a black preacher and activist in Birmingham, Alabama during the civil rights movement. A brave man, he was a strong opponent of segregation. When news went around that he was planning on riding a segregated bus, the Ku Klux Klan bombed his house. Miraculously, though, Shuttlesworth survived, and this experience made him feel invincible. Shuttlesworth experienced several other close-calls, all of which simply emboldened him even more. Gladwell calls upon these stories to further illustrate the idea of “near misses” and “remote misses,” which suggest that traumatic events can reinvigorate people and make them feel stronger. Later in the civil rights movement, Shuttlesworth worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. and Wyatt Walker to undermine Birmingham’s racist public safety commissioner, Bull Connor.