After the sudden emergence of the ACMHR ministers, White leaders were left dumbfounded and deeply concerned about how they could be controlled. They first called Rev. Shuttlesworth and his fellow ministers radicals, Communists, and outsiders who tricked church members through force and lies, and they asked moderate Black middle-class leaders who followed a more conservative approach to ending racial segregation to address the growing militants among the masses in the African-American community, but they could not. The ACMHR's leaders became a force to be reckoned with, and Rev. Shuttlesworth became so central that the organization came to be known simply as Shuttlesworth's organization. Beginning in June 1956, Rev. Shuttlesworth led mass meetings each Monday night at Bethel Baptist, while other ACMHR ministers did the same at their churches. These meetings inspired and informed ACMHR members, who numbered between 900 and 1,200, more than half of them women, and who were mainly working-class people, including many unskilled or semi-skilled workers. Compared to the NAACP, the ACMHR received little financial support from upper- and middle-class Blacks, who considered the new organization too militant. Less than a year after the ACMHR began, Public Safety Commissioner Eugene Bull Connor sent plainclothes police detectives to secretly record the mass meetings, and their written records later became valuable sources for historians of the Birmingham Movement.