Published On: 01.24.23 | 

By: Michael Sznajderman

Shelley ‘The Playboy’ Stewart: Six decades after 1963, the struggle continues

Shelley MAIN FEATURE large

Shelley Stewart's voice on the radio summoned Birmingham's Black students to protest against segregation. Sixty years later, he asserts that much work remains to be done in the battle for human rights. (Birmingham Black Radio Museum, Michael Sznajderman)

This story is part of a series of articles, “Bending Toward Justice,” focusing on the 60th anniversary of events that took place in Birmingham during 1963 that changed the face of the city, and the world, in the ongoing struggle for equality and human rights. The series name is a reference to a quote by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.: “Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” The series will continue through 2023.

Ask Shelley Stewart to describe himself, and there’s no hesitation.

“I’m a street kid.”

It would be hard to find a more apt characterization. Born into extreme poverty, Stewart at age 5 witnessed his mother’s murder at the hands of his father. As a child, he was forced to live with his brothers on an outdoor porch, sleep on a bedbug-infested and urine-soaked mattress, and scrounge moldy scraps from garbage cans to survive.

Stewart’s young life was horrific, but the journey also had a few bright spots – moments when people lifted him and helped him to press on. It was a journey that also helped steel him for a parallel struggle, against the official oppression, bigotry and injustice of Jim Crow Birmingham, where murders of Black folks and the bombings of Black homes, businesses and houses of faith went unpunished for decades – an organized system of racial terrorism that earned Birmingham its infamous nickname, “Bombingham.”

This was the Birmingham of Stewart’s youth. But as he grew into a young man, Stewart gained a deeper understanding of the system’s evils. Beyond the higher-profile murders and bombings, there were the daily indignities that Blacks faced in Birmingham – the routine putdowns and racial epithets, the separate and unequal facilities, the unequal pay, not to mention the inability – if you were Black – to sit in a restaurant, use the front door of a commercial establishment or try on clothes at a department store. In addition to the official restrictions imposed on Blacks, Stewart learned of the unreported horrors: the rape of Black housemaids by their white employers and the indiscriminate incarceration of young Black men who came to Birmingham seeking economic opportunity, only to end up in jail on bogus charges such as vagrancy.

A young Shelley Stewart. (contributed)

By 1963, nearly 10 years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” facilities were unconstitutional, eight years after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, very little in the Deep South had changed.

Stewart, however – who was 28 at the start of 1963 – had gone through his own extraordinary journey, and it had changed him. At 16, while attending all-Black Parker High School, he got a job at local radio station WBCO. He later transferred to the now-closed Rosedale School, where he rose to senior class president but was denied a college scholarship because of his troubled family upbringing. Stewart then chose to leave Birmingham for New York City, where he attended broadcasting school. He then spent time in the Air Force.

Now, he was back in Birmingham, and in 1963, one of the city’s most popular radio disc jockeys. “Shelley the Playboy” had an avid following among Black and white teens. After experiencing unspeakable abuse as a child, and having come of age amid all the injustices and inequities of the segregated South, Stewart had risen to a position of some influence, and even fame. And as a result of his journey, there was something he no longer suffered from: fear.

“It was my bad habit,” the 88-year-old Stewart explained in a recent interview. “My bad habit was not being afraid.”

Birmingham’s Shelley Stewart was a loud, clear voice in the struggles of 1963 from Alabama News Center on Vimeo.

Indeed, as 1963 dawned and civil rights leaders discussed strategy for a daunting attempt to topple segregation in the most segregated city in the South, Shelley the Playboy was already battle-hardened, a popular local Black figure who’d been targeted for racist threats and segregationist backlash.

In the 1950s in Birmingham, Stewart helped spread the word about the Monday night “movement” meetings led by the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and other Black leaders active in the equal rights struggle. (This was before people talked about “civil rights,” Stewart said). As a member of the “media,” Stewart said he stayed away from the meetings, but on the radio he helped misdirect the all-white, racist police department and its leader, Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor, about the gatherings.

Stewart and his employers were routinely subject to harassment by the Ku Klux Klan. (Image courtesy of Shelley Stewart)

One night in 1958 – at that time Stewart was announcing on Birmingham station WEDR – members of the Ku Klux Klan converged at the station and spray-painted the letters “KKK” on its exterior walls. According to a report in The Birmingham News, the incident followed 10 days of threatening phone calls to the “negro” station, warning it to “get off the air and stay off.” A photo in the paper captured a defiant Stewart scrubbing off the racist graffiti.

In 1960, Stewart had a weekly evening gig spinning popular tunes at the dance club Don’s Teen Town in Bessemer, where young whites would flock to enjoy the music. During the day on the radio, Stewart took indirect shots at the city’s white power structure and its segregationist policies. For example, he would proclaim how listeners needed “both the white and black keys” to make music on the piano.

“In order to get things clean in the washing machine, you got to agitate!” Stewart declared over the airwaves.

“I was a mass communicator, but I was also an educator,” Stewart said, “getting the messages out little by little.”

In July 1960, the Klan decided it was time to teach Stewart a lesson. Some 80 Klansmen surrounded Don’s Teen Town, demanding that the manager hand him over. Instead, hundreds of white teens emerged from the club, scaring off the Klan while Stewart escaped.

“I would see how far I could go,” Stewart said.

He drove a cherry-red car with “Shelley the Playboy” emblazoned on it. And on the radio, he continued his litany of thinly veiled messages challenging the status quo and specifically Connor, a virulent segregationist who began his professional and political life as a sports announcer and radio personality.

“Bull Connor knew me, and I knew him,” Stewart said. “He loved attention; he liked to fire back” – traits Connor ironically shared with Stewart. And Stewart, in turn, wasn’t afraid to prod the Bull.

He related one encounter with Connor at City Hall. Connor was walking down the hall, so Stewart intentionally took a sip from the whites-only water fountain. “Hey, Shelley, you can’t do that,” Connor yelled. “It’s fine!” Shelley responded. “It works just fine!”

1963: Birmingham becomes the battleground

In early 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. and leaders from his Southern Christian Leadership Conference arrived in Birmingham, at the request of Shuttlesworth, to launch a civil disobedience campaign with the goal of ending segregation in the city. Birmingham was in the midst of a political evolution, with voters in November 1962 approving a new mayor-council form of government as opposed to the existing city commission system. The first election under the new system was set for March 1963, with Connor pitted against former Lt. Gov. Albert Boutwell in the mayor’s race. While also a segregationist, Boutwell was considered a progressive compared to Connor.

Fred Shuttlesworth persuaded Martin Luther King Jr. to launch a civil disobedience campaign in Birmingham. (National Park Service)

The effort by civil rights leaders included a springtime selective-buying campaign led by students at Miles College, designed to hurt pre-Easter sales at stores that didn’t treat Blacks as equals to whites. There were also protest marches, which resulted in the April 12 arrest of King and his writing the famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Still, the campaign didn’t catch fire or draw national attention as leaders had hoped.

It was then that a King aide, James Bevel, considered a new and riskier tactic: engaging more young Blacks, including local students, in the protest marches. Bevel floated the idea by Stewart and another prominent radio personality, Paul Dudley “Tall Paul” White. The two DJs were enthusiastic and agreed to support the effort, along with another popular radio announcer, Erskine Faush.

The three helped Bevel get the word out to student leaders at the area’s Black high schools who coordinated a whisper campaign to other Black youngsters across the region. A date was set; Thursday, May 2 was designated “D-Day” – when a mass protest of Black high school students, and students even younger, would depart from Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, cross Kelly Ingram Park and march into the white business district.

Deploying coded messages they sent across the radio waves, Stewart and White were instrumental in firing up students to participate in what would later be dubbed the “Children’s Crusade.” It was a tactic that King, at first, was reluctant to embrace.

Radio personality “Tall Paul” White joined Stewart in broadcasting coded protest messages. (contributed)

“Better pack your toothbrush today!” Stewart broadcast from the studio, a signal to students that they should expect to be arrested and spend the night in jail. “There’s going to be a field trip in the park and luncheon will be served!”

Some leaders were skeptical about the students showing up. Stewart, White and Bevel were not among them.

Indeed, more than 1,000 Black students from across the metro area, some from as far away as Bessemer and Fairfield, skipped school. They drove and walked for miles to the church, filling every pew. By the end of the first day, 973 students had been arrested.

The next day, however, Connor had a surprise in store; he ordered the police to bring their K-9 units, and the fire department to bring water hoses, which were turned on the students with such force they were blown down and across the pavement. With thousands of spectators watching, and media recording the event, Friday, May 3 – “Double-D Day” – would shock the world, including President John F. Kennedy. That day, 1,922 students and other protesters were arrested. The following morning, photos of fire hoses and police dogs snarling at Black youngsters were on the front page of The New York Times.

The protests continued. Students arrested and released from custody returned straightaway to march again. Now, Stewart and other DJs encouraged the teens to “wear their bathing suits” to the park as they played the Bobby Darin hit “Splish Splash.”

On Day 3, more than 4,100 arrests were made, forcing authorities to lock up children not only in the city jail but at the state fairgrounds.

Bull Connor’s attempt to violently repress the children’s protest helped topple racist policies in Birmingham. (National Park Service)

By Tuesday, May 7, after almost a week of children’s protests and arrests, and national outrage growing, it was clear that Connor and Birmingham’s pro-segregation authorities were losing control. Birmingham’s business community, meanwhile, was ready to negotiate and put an end the city’s embarrassment. On May 10, after 72 hours of talks, King announced an agreement to gradually end segregationist policies in the city.

Stewart, who broadcast his show from his record shop at the corner of Kelly Ingram Park, across the street from Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, watched from the window as the stunning enormity of the events unfolded.

Sixty years later, he views the Birmingham protests of 1963 as a moment in an ongoing continuum in the development of human rights.

“It was the culmination of things,” Stewart said, noting it was preceded by years of struggle and aided by “the resistance of the establishment to do the right things.”

But much more struggle, and tragedy, was still ahead.

A stellar, multilayered career

A month after the agreement in Birmingham, Kennedy went on nationwide television to call for federal civil rights legislation outlawing segregation nationwide.

Four months later, in September, four little girls would be murdered by Klansmen in the infamous bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. It would be more than a decade before anyone would be brought to trial for the crime.

Stewart takes pride, as a veteran, in a lesser-known development in 1963 related to civil rights in which he also played a role: the decision by the Veterans of Foreign Wars to end segregation at its local posts.

And while the events of 1963 were certainly significant in the history of human rights, Stewart said he is concerned about another issue that is unresolved in America – an ongoing lack of unity.

“Some say segregation is over, but we’re just as segregated now as we were in 1963,” said Stewart, who went on to navigate multiple successful careers – as an advertising executive, radio station owner and television personality. His radio broadcasting career lasted 52 years, making him one of the longest on-air personalities in the history of the medium.

The Mattie C. Stewart Foundation is named after Stewart’s murdered mother. (contributed)

His career in advertising began in 1962, when he became a silent partner in the Birmingham agency Steiner-Bressler. At the time, he stayed behind the scenes because it was difficult for a Black man to be the public business partner of a white man. That firm ultimately evolved into the prominent Birmingham communications and public relations firm O2 Ideas, where Stewart was chairman and CEO. He sold his interest in the firm in 2015.

Today, while enjoying a quieter life at his home in Shelby County, Stewart continues to be in demand as an inspirational speaker and counselor. His memoir, “The Road South,” was published by Time Warner in 2002. A biography of Stewart, “Mattie C’s Boy,” by Don Keith, was published in 2013.

Stewart is also founder and leader of the Mattie C. Stewart Foundation, which he named in tribute to his murdered mother. It focuses on education and reducing the high school dropout rate by better preparing students for academic success.

Because for Stewart, education remains “the key,” he said. Not only is it pivotal for helping young people lead better lives; it is a proven path toward greater understanding among all people.

“It’s not about hatred, it’s about America – these United States. It’s about liberty and justice for all,” Stewart said.

“That’s why we say the struggle continues. If you look at 1963, and you look now – it’s still going on.

“1963 opened a lot of doors, but it did not cure the disease,” Stewart said. “We were miseducated about colorism. Until we realize we are all human beings, that we’re all in it together, it’s not over.”