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Remembering
Ken Shilman
1942 to 1989 |
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By
Howie Levy
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I
learned only in September 2003 of the passing 14 years earlier of
my friend, classmate and high school fraternity brother, Ken Shilman. He
died of cancer on September 7, 1989, at the age of 47.
Despite his size (he was 6'5", mostly likely the tallest of all our
classmates), in high school, Ken was an extremely soft-spoken, unassuming and gentle fellow, gangly and anything but
outspoken or opinionated. In fact, for a man so large, he was almost
invisible and so quiet that many of you may not even
remember him.
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I
know little about Ken's life after OHS except as noted on this page, but what little I
do know about Ken may surprise many of you. |
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"Buses are a-comin', oh yeah." |
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Beginning in the spring of
1961, our quiet, unassuming classmate became actively involved in
the civil rights movement when he watched television coverage of the
assaults on the early Freedom Riders and was moved to take a bus
ride to the South.
You
might have read about Ken in a newspaper when he was arrested in
Jackson, Mississippi, and
imprisoned in the dreaded Parchman State Penitentiary where he was brutally
treated. |
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"They're rollin' into
Jackson, oh yes." |
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The two photos above are of Ken being taken away with others in a
paddy wagon following their arrest in Jackson, Mississippi.
The first photo is from a remarkable 2-hour PBS documentary called
"Freedom Riders," which first aired May 16, 2011, commemorating the
50th
anniversary of the original ride, and which can be viewed in
its entirety online at
www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/freedomriders/. The
second photo is displayed on http://ms50thfreedomridersreunion.org/
courtesy of the Mississippi
Department of Archives and History.
The following article about Ken
is from a June 1961 edition of a Jackson,
Mississippi, newspaper: |
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Soon after his Mississippi experience, Ken joined the Young
Socialists Alliance (YSA) and in 1962, worked as a hospital workers union organizer in Brooklyn.
The YSA was an independent socialist youth group whose leadership,
among other things, was appalled by racism and, therefore,
sympathetic to the rapidly escalating civil rights movement. It was
loosely aligned with the Socialist Worker's (communist) Party in
which he later became a party leader for the rest of his short
life.
Who could have
predicted that our gentle Ken would become a civil rights
activist, that he might have ever done something so incredibly
brave as to have been a Freedom Rider
– and then
become a communist party leader?
You can
read a little about Ken and a lot about what he was passionate about
in both
Freedom Riders
– 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice
by Raymond Arsenault,
in
The Party: A Political Memoir.
Volume 1: The Sixties
by
Barry Sheppard, and in other sources accessible from Google. |
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Classmates
and other visitors are invited to submit material for a special
memorial page like this for any
other departed classmate. Just e-mail it to me.
Howie
Copyright
© 2003-2011 by Howard B. Levy and 1960 Sailors
Association Inc. All rights reserved.
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