Dr. Shelley Stewart

Dr. Shelley Stewart was born in the Rosedale section of Birmingham, Alabama on September 24, 1934. Stewart’s background can be understood in two words – obstacles overcome. Today he is a successful businessman, however as a child, his future was anything but bright. Stewart’s rise to prominence began as a radio personality in the 1950s and ’60s. His radio broadcasts were a conduit for protest organizations during Birmingham’s civil rights struggles. His expansion into marketing also began in the 1960s, culminating in his position as the President and CEO of o2ideas, one of the country’s longest-running and largest privately held corporate communication companies.

Stewart overcame impoverished beginnings and horrific family tragedies as a child. At age 5, he witnessed his father murder his mother, Mattie C., with an ax. Later, living with relatives, he was stripped, suspended from the ceiling, and whipped until bloody. Salt was then placed in his wounds. When he and his brothers were returned to his father, he was forced to sleep on his father’s front porch until he ran away. Out of this story of poverty and neglect emerged a man whose voracious appetite for reading fueled his later success.

In 1949, Stewart got a job as a school reporter at WBCO in Bessemer. There, he began to develop his radio personality. After graduation, he didn’t get the college scholarship he expected. His principal told him he lacked the family support required for college, even though he had top grades. Needing a job, Stewart joined the Air Force and served 2 years. He returned to Birmingham in 1953 and got a job at WEDR radio. “Shelley the Playboy”, his radio persona, had arrived.

At WEDR, Stewart quickly grew a loyal following, which also included a large number of white listeners. However, his popularity with white kids did not sit well with everyone. In 1958, his radio station went off the air when the broadcast tower was cut down. In 1960, he barely escaped with his life, when the Ku Klux Klan broke up one of his platter parties because they objected to white and black teenagers dancing in the same room.

His broadcasts during Birmingham’s human rights struggles of the 1960s served as a critical communication mechanism for young African Americans involved in street protests. During the civil rights spring of 1963, Stewart joined other African American radio personalities in broadcasting coded messages to young demonstrators telling them when and where marches would occur. Stewart and other radio personalities helped Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. mount the historic Children’s March through the streets of Birmingham.

Stewart retired from broadcasting in 2002. While visiting his brother Sam in a California prison, he learned that most of the inmates never finished school. In 2007, he started the Mattie C. Stewart Foundation, an organization that works to reduce the high school dropout rate. Today, the offices of o2ideas sit on land that was once Edgewood Lake where Stewart and his brother fished as children. His lifetime odyssey is chronicled in The Road South, a book he co-authored, and Mattie C’s Boy-The Shelley Stewart Story.