Harvey Shapiro, poet and New York Times editor (1924–2013)

Poet and editor Harvey Shapiro died earlier this week, on January 7, at the age of 88. Shapiro had a storied career, publishing a dozen books over the course of six decades. For forty years, until he retired in 1995, he worked for The New York Times; he was editor of the Book Review from 1975 to 1983. A frequent and beloved presence at The Library of America headquarter offices and at events, he edited Poets of World War II for the American Poets Project series; the anthology was both a critical and commercial success, with nearly 18,000 copies in print.

As the obituary in The New York Times recounts, Shapiro played a role in the publication of one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous pieces—only to face insurmountable resistance from his own colleagues at the Times:

In the early 1960s, as an editor at The Times Magazine, Mr. Shapiro made what was almost certainly his most inspired assignment. Reading about one of Dr. King’s frequent jailings, he telephoned the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The next time Dr. King was in jail for any significant period, Mr. Shapiro suggested, he should compose a letter for publication.

In April 1963, while jailed in Birmingham, Ala., Dr. King did just that. But according to several published accounts, including Carry Me Home (2001), Diane McWhorter’s Pulitzer Prize–winning chronicle of the civil rights movement, Mr. Shapiro was unable to persuade his superiors at the magazine to print it.

“Letter From Birmingham Jail,” which endures as one of the canonical texts of the civil rights movement, was published instead in The Christian Century, The New Leader and elsewhere.

During World War II, Shapiro flew 35 missions over central Europe as a B-17 radio gunner based in Italy. (The photo above, reprinted in Poets of World War II, shows him standing next to his plane.) One of the many poems based on his war experiences, “Battle Report” (originally published in 1966 and included in the WWII volume), describes how the war still haunted his dreams:

In this slow dream’s rehearsal,
Again I am the death-instructed kid,
Gun in its cradle, sun at my back,
Cities below me without sound.
That tensed, corrugated hose
Feeding to my face the air of substance,
I face the mirroring past.

There will be a tribute to Harvey Shapiro this Sunday, January 13, on The Next Hour, airing on WBAI (New York) at 11:00 a.m. Janet Coleman, the program’s host, will lead a discussion featuring poets Hugh Seidman and Bill Zavatsky, Library of America editor-in-chief Geoffrey O’Brien, and author Maggie Paley.

• Listen to Harvey Shapiro discuss Poets of World War II on NPR's Fresh Air.

Remembering Fred Shuttlesworth, civil rights pioneer who made history on street corners

Fred Shuttlesworth, an icon of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, died last week at 89. With Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy, Shuttlesworth was one of the “Big Three” who planned and led the protests and demonstrations that led to the landmark Civil Rights Bill of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

While both were founding members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, Shuttlesworth and King came from quite different backgrounds, as The New York Times obituary notes:

Dr. King was a polished product of Atlanta’s black middle class. A graduate of Morehouse College, he held a Ph.D. in systematic theology from Boston University. Fred Shuttlesworth was a child of poor black Alabama whose ministerial degree was from an unaccredited black school. (He later earned a master’s degree in education from Alabama State College.)

The Times quotes Diane McWhorter, author of Carry Me Home, her Pulitzer Prize–winning account of the civil rights struggle in Birmingham in 1963:

Among the youthful “elders” of the movement, [Shuttlesworth] was Martin Luther King’s most effective and insistent foil: blunt where King was soothing, driven where King was leisurely, and most important, confrontational where King was conciliatory—meaning, critically, that he was more upsetting than King in the eyes of the white public.

In “Tear Gas and Hymns,” his account of the siege of the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, during the violent days of the May 1961 Freedom Rides, Murray Kempton describes Shuttlesworth as “the merriest agitator of them all.” The Guardian’s obituary relates a revealing incident from the same period:

When the riders were beaten up in Anniston, Alabama, Shuttlesworth, on his own initiative, organized a convoy of 15 cars to rescue them. Later, when the riders were surrounded by a mob of about 1,000 armed white people, Shuttlesworth escorted another civil rights leader, James Farmer, to the church. "He was either insane or the most courageous man I have ever met," Farmer said later. "Shuttlesworth just walked through them, as cool as a cucumber. I think they were intimidated by his boldness."

In January 1963 Shuttlesworth invited King to come to Birmingham and make the city the center of the next stage of the civil rights struggle. While King prepared for the offensive by touring the country and giving twenty-eight speeches in sixteen cities, Shuttlesworth engineered the strategy, studying city laws and march routes. The demonstrations began in March but the climax came in May, when the organizers recruited schoolchildren to participate. On the first day that the children marched, school buses ferried some 959 children off to detention areas. The next day Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor deployed police dogs and fire hoses on the young protesters. Images of children being tossed in the air by torrents of water were broadcast nationwide. In Eyes on the Prize Juan Williams quotes David Vann, an attorney and eyewitness to these events, as saying that when Connor’s troops attacked the children “in the twinkling of an eye the whole black community consolidated . . . behind Dr. King.”

Shuttlesworth himself was hosed and knocked against a wall with such force that he was hospitalized for several days. When Connor heard this, according to Claude Sitton’s report in The New York Times, he exclaimed, “I waited a week to see Shuttlesworth get hit with a hose. I’m sorry I missed it.” Told that Shuttlesworth had been taken away in an ambulance, Connor replied, “I wish they’d carried him away in a hearse.”

Shuttlesworth was never daunted. An NPR memorial quotes historian Horace Huntley: “He would lead demonstrations, and he would call Bull Connor and say, ‘Bull, I will be on such and such corner; if you want to be part of history, be there.’”

Previous Reader’s Almanac posts of interest:

• Rosa Parks keeps her seat and launches the Civil Rights Movement
• James Baldwin on hearing Martin Luther King preach in Montgomery
• Charles Sherrod and Fannie Lou Hamer at the Democratic National Convention, August 1964

Related LOA works: Reporting Civil Rights: Part One: American Journalism 1941–1963 (includes Murray Kempton on the 1961 Freedom Rides and many articles on Birmingham in 1963)

James Baldwin on hearing Martin Luther King preach in Montgomery

In 1961 Harper’s Magazine commissioned James Baldwin to write a profile of Martin Luther King. Baldwin had first met King in 1958, a little more than a year after the Montgomery Bus Boycott (which King had helped lead) had ended in a federal decree outlawing desegregation on public buses. In “The Dangerous Road Before Martin Luther King” Baldwin, once a teenage preacher himself, offers one of the most vivid and insightful accounts of what it was like to hear the twenty-nine-year-old King:

King is a great speaker. The secret of his greatness does not lie in his voice or his presence or his manner, though it has something to do with all these; nor does it lie in his verbal range or felicity, which are not striking; nor does he have any capacity for those stunning, demagogic flights of the imagination which bring an audience cheering to its feet. The secret lies, I think, in his intimate knowledge of the people he is addressing, be they black or white, and in the forthrightness with which he speaks of those things which hurt and baffle them.  He does not offer any easy comfort and this keeps his hearers absolutely tense. He allows them their self-respect—indeed, he insists on it.

Most preachers, Baldwin notes, offer their congregation only “the sustenance for another day’s journey.” King by contrast made everyone who heard him feel they could “change their situation.” Baldwin quotes an example:

“. . . And we’ve got to stop lying to the white man. Every time you let the white man think you think segregation is right, you are co-operating with him in doing evil.

“The next time,” he said, “the white man asks you what you think of segregation, you tell him, Mr. Charlie, I think it’s wrong and I wish you’d do something about it by nine o’clock tomorrow morning!”

This brought a wave of laughter and King smiled, too. But he had meant every word he said, and he expected his hearers to act on them. They also expected this of themselves, which is not the usual effect of a sermon; and that they are living up to their expectations no white man in Montgomery will deny.

Previously on Reader’s Almanac:

• Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott
• James Baldwin and his impact on American culture
  

Related LOA works: James Baldwin: Collected Essays

Rosa Parks keeps her seat and launches the Civil Rights Movement

On the fifty-fifth anniversary of Rosa Parks’s historic decision not to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, Donald Pennington asks:

... can we all have the courage of that one woman whom, though all alone, simply refused and stood her ground? When the moment of truth arrives in our lives, will we be as self-confident, defiant, and as beautiful as Rosa Parks?

In an essay in 1972 James Baldwin phrased a similar thought somewhat differently:

If Mrs. Parks had merely had a headache that day, and if the community had had no grievances, there would have been no bus boycott and we would never have heard of Martin Luther King.

Although the three riders next to her did give up their seats to white passengers, Rosa Parks refused. She chose to be arrested:

People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.

At the time of her arrest Parks had been a secretary for the NAACP in Montgomery, and E. D. Nixon, the local NAACP leader, quickly secured the services of a white lawyer to bail her out. King biographer Taylor Branch captures Nixon’s thoughts as he delivered her home:

Rosa Parks was without peer as a potential symbol for Montgomery’s Negroes—humble enough to be claimed by the common folk, and yet dignified enough in manner, speech, and dress to command the respect of the leading classes.

When Nixon asked her if she was willing to fight the case, Parks responded “If you think it will mean something to Montgomery and do some good, I’ll be happy to go along with it.” She was arrested on a Thursday. Over the weekend 35,000 handbills were distributed calling for a one-day bus boycott the following Monday, the day Parks was to be arraigned.

Martin Luther King Jr. later wrote of being called to the window by his wife early Monday morning:

As I approached the front window, Coretta pointed joyfully to a slowly moving bus. ‘Darling, it’s empty!’ I could hardly believe what I saw. I knew the South Jackson line, which ran past our house, carried more Negro passengers than any other line in Montgomery . . .

The Kings then knew the boycott would be a success. Later that day an assembly of local ministers created the Montgomery Improvement Association and elected twenty-six-year-old King its first president. That night thousands gathered in the Holt Street Baptist Church to decide whether the boycott should continue. This would be the occasion for King’s first historic speech:

Just the other day, just last Thursday to be exact, one of the finest citizens in Montgomery (Amen)—not one of the finest Negro citizens (That’s right), but one of the finest citizens in Montgomery—was taken from a bus (Yes) and carried to jail and arrested (Yes) because she refused to get up to give her seat to a white person. (Yes, that’s right) . . .

And you know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. [Sustained applause]

Joe Abzell captured the aftermath in his report for The Montgomery Advertiser:

When the resolution on continuing the boycott of the bus was read, there came a wild whoop of delight. Many said they would never ride the bus again. . . The meeting was much like an old-fashioned revival with loud applause added. It proved beyond any doubt there was a discipline among Negroes that many whites had doubted. It was almost a military discipline combined with emotion.

The boycott lasted thirteen months and ended only when, in late December 1956, the Supreme Court affirmed a lower court’s ruling outlawing segregation on Alabama buses.



Related LOA works: Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1941-1963 (includes “The Rosa Parks Protest Meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church,” by Joe Abzell); American Speeches: Political Oratory from Abraham Lincoln to Bill Clinton (includes Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech to the Montgomery Improvement Association, December 5, 1955)