Shelley Stewart (born 1934) overcame impoverished beginnings and family tragedies as a child to eventually become one of Birmingham, Alabama’s best-known radio personalities and one of America’s most prominent African American businessmen. In 2008, he will be inducted into the first class of the Alabama Broadcasters Hall of Fame and also be the first African American inducted into the ABA Hall of Fame.

His story of poverty and neglect inspires all who know him, a man who taught himself to read. Eventually finding employment as a disc jockey in the 1950s, his radio broadcasts during Birmingham’s human rights struggles of the 1960s served as a critical communication path for young African Americans involved in street protests in Birmingham. Shelley was long affiliated with WENN-AM and known a Shelley the Playboy. He retired from WATV-AM where he had become a c-owner. Stewart’s “parallel career” in advertising also began in the 1960s. Joining forces with a partner in the 1990s, Stewart is now Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of O2 Ideas, a multicultural advertising and public relations firm based in Birmingham.

In the deeply segregated city of Birmingham in the 1940s, he survived witnessing his own mother’s murder, suffering abandonment as an infant, and severe abuse as a child. This lifetime odyssey is chronicled in “The Road South,” a book by Time Warner.