0614 Shelley Stewart
Shelley Stewart with students
Shelley Stewart will tell you he is still doing the same thing he was doing 50 or 60 years ago — bringing people together to make the world a better place. Today, at age 80, that looks like running an advertising agency and an education-focused nonprofit organization. But in the 1950s and ’60s, he was better known as on-air radio personality Shelley the Playboy.
As a longtime deejay in Birmingham, Stewart provided commentary on what was happening in the city with the fight for civil rights. As his biography, Mattie C’s Boy: The Shelley Stewart Story, describes, he was riding on his popularity to cloak his talk of what other media outlets were unwilling to report.
On WENN-AM radio in 1963, Stewart updated listeners cryptically about times and locations for meetings and rallies. His role would become critical in the middle of that year.
“Children were saying, ‘We want our freedom,’ and adults were saying, ‘We are afraid,’” Stewart recalled in a recent interview. With that in mind, Stewart worked with other leaders of the movement to go a new route.
In May, Stewart and other radio personalities invited high school student leaders to lunch at the Gaston Motel. Around 30 teenagers listened as the deejays encouraged them to start a “whispering campaign” for an upcoming event and warned them it could be dangerous and that they could go to jail.
On May 2, more than 1,000 students didn’t show up to school or left class early. Midday, Stewart played a pre-designated song on the radio that signaled the teenagers to march two by two to Kelly Ingram Park. There they knelt and prayed and held up signs saying “Freedom” and “We shall overcome.”
“I was doing nothing different than communicating to all people, calling all children to go to the park,” Stewart recalled.
His words, “It’s cold outside!” (in reality, it was nearing 90 degrees) then signaled them to march toward City Hall, singing spirituals and chanting slogans. Stewart watched from his record shop.
“If you heard the children, they said, ‘I am not afraid of jail, I want freedom,’” he said.
He later learned more than 600 would go to jail that day.
The next day, however, was the one that would go on in infamy. From his office Stewart watched as fire trucks and riot police pulled up on the surrounding streets.
Once again, he signaled a march with a song on the radio. What resulted would make the front cover of the New York Times the next day: images of teenagers being attacked by police dogs and fire hoses. Many were arrested, but many came back two subsequent dates.
Following this series of events, President John F. Kennedy gave a speech on June 11 calling for legislation “giving all Americans the right to be served in facilities which are open to the public — hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and similar establishments,” as well as “greater protection for the right to vote.”
A year later, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, enacted on July 2, 1964, outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin, legally ending unequal application of voter registration requirements and segregation in schools, workplaces and public accommodations.
The actions on the streets of Birmingham in 1963 brought about changes in civil rights, but Stewart believes it did little for human rights — the issue he said is what he and others were fighting for in the 1950s and ’60s.
“You can’t legislate morality,” Stewart said. “That’s my problem with civil rights laws.”
Today, Stewart believes Birmingham has come a long way. Growing up in Rosedale, he remembers the days when he could only visit Vulcan after a certain time of day and only go to the state fair on Friday. But he doesn’t think we have come far enough.
“I am a business man, and yet in this region, they would like to call me a black business man,” he said.
He points out how companies such as Verizon, Honda, Chick-fil-A and Books-A-Million sought out the advertising firm he co-founded and leads today, o2ideas, because it was the best company for the job, not because he was a “black guy from Alabama.”
Each day when he passes Vulcan on his way to his office off Lakeshore Drive, Stewart dreams of it being a symbol of human rights for all who see it.
“Yes, things have changed and suburbs were built because people wanted to move out of Birmingham,” he said. “Some things were better, but only in certain areas. If you don’t deal with human rights issues in this country, we are going to have problems.”
The key to that dealing for Stewart is education, and that’s what the Mattie C. Stewart Foundation, the organization he named for his mother, focuses on.
“I think education will bring people together, I really do,” he said.
