Mattie C.’s Boy

Shelley Stewart was five when he and his brothers watched their father murder their mother with an axe; six when he became homeless, suffering unspeakable abuses. He was 16 when he first sat behind a radio microphone; 25 when the Ku Klux Klan cut down a radio tower to get him off the air; 30 when he helped Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., mount the historic Children's March through the streets of Birmingham. Throughout his life, he countered ignorance with intelligence, fought injustice with tenacity and faced hostility without fear, guided by the memory of his mother, Mattie C.