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Remembering
Kenneth
M. Shilman
(August 16,1942, to
September 7, 1989) |
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"Buses are a-comin', oh yes"
By Howie Levy
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I
learned only in September 2003 of the passing 14 years earlier of my friend and high school fraternity brother, and our
classmate, Ken Shilman.
Ken last resided in in or near San Francisco, California, where he died in 1989
from cancer at the age of 47, which was undiagnosed during a long period of
suffering. Ken never married.
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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"They're rollin' into
Jackson, oh yes." |
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I
knew little about Ken's life after OHS except as I have been able to research
for this page. What little I
do know about Ken, however, may surprise many of you. And I am proud to have been his friend. |
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Beginning in the spring of
1961, our quiet, unassuming classmate became actively involved in
the nation's civil rights movement. When he watched television coverage of the
assaults on the early Freedom Riders, he and his best friend, Joseph
McDonald (OHS '58), were moved to hitchhike to Montgomery,
Alabama, and join others on a bus
ride from there to Jackson, Mississippi.
You
might have read about Ken in a newspaper in June 1961 (see below) when he was arrested in
Jackson and
imprisoned in the dreaded Parchman State Penitentiary where
prisoners were invariably treated brutally. |
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The two photos above are of Ken being taken away with others in a
paddy wagon following his arrest in Jackson, Mississippi, June 2,
1961.
These two photos are from film
obtained from the Mississippi
Department of Archives and History
and featured in a remarkable, triple Emmy-winning* 2-hour PBS documentary called
"Freedom Riders," which commemorated the
50th
anniversary of the first ride, which can still be viewed in its entirety
(or a copy can be purchased) online at
www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/freedomriders.
_____________
*
2011: (1) Outstanding Picture
Editing, (2) Outstanding Writing (both for Nonfiction
Programming),
and (3)
Exceptional Merit in Nonfiction Filmmaking
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Immediately above is an Associated Press (AP) photo that shows Ken with
his co-Freedom Rider and best friend,
Joe McDonald (center)
as they were escorted by authorities out of the "colored waiting
room" at the Trailways bus station,
just prior to entering the paddy wagon under arrest. Joe
McDonald and Ken are featured in
Richie Woods'
second book,
Legendary Locals of
Oceanside.
Below is Ken's official mug shot from that June 1961 arrest:
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Below
are AP photos of Ken and Joe taken in Joe's
backyard in Oceanside as
they were being interviewed (according to
Richie's book) by the New York Times on June 26, 1961,
after they returned from Mississippi. |
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Following is an AP syndicated article about Ken as it
appeared June 21,1961, in a Jackson, Mississippi, newspaper (and
many others):
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According to the accounts in
Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power,
by Timothy B. Tyson,
and
in
The Making
of Black Revolutionaries,
by James Forman, in August 1961, after
picketing in Monroe County, North Carolina, Ken was arrested with
others, charged with inciting a riot and jailed again.
Soon after these experiences, 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 Ken later became a party leader for the rest of his short
life.
Who could have
predicted that our gentle giant, Ken Shilman, would
become a passionate and lifelong idealist dedicated to social
causes, that he might become a civil rights activist and done something so
extraordinarily brave and incredibly selfless as to have risked his
life as a Freedom Rider
─
and then to
become an American 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
and in other sources accessible from a Google search or from the
extensive online bibliography at
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/freedomriders/about/further-reading.
For a recorded interview
specifically about Ken's civil rights activism, visit also
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8gNkr2dXcA&feature=related.
You can read a little more about
Ken and a lot about socialist causes Ken was passionate about
in
The Party: A Political Memoir.
Volume 1: The Sixties
by
Barry Sheppard. |
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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
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