Six Communications Leaders to be Inducted into C&IS Hall of Fame at UA

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – Six distinguished leaders who had a profound influence on American democracy will be inducted into the College of Communication and Information Sciences Hall of Fame at The University of Alabama on Oct. 24, 2002.

Established by the C&IS Board of Visitors, the Communication Hall of Fame was created in 1998 to honor, preserve and perpetuate the names and accomplishments of communication personalities who have brought lasting fame to the state of Alabama. This year marks the fifth class of inductees into the Hall of Fame. These honored individuals include:

• Gould M. Beech (1913 – 2000), Newspaperman and political consultant
• Hugo L. Black (1886 – 1971), Supreme Court Justice, Senator and First Amendment champion
• Edwin C. Bridges (1945 – ), Director of the Alabama Department of Archives and History
• Neil O. Davis (1914 – 2000), Newspaperman and social activist
• Virginia F. Durr (1903 – 1999), Wife of Clifford Durr (Hall of Fame 1998), activist, organizer, leader in the civil rights movement and sister-in-law to Hugo Black
• Fred. L. Shuttlesworth (1922 – ), Leader of Alabama’s civil rights movement

C&IS’s Hall of Fame salutes individuals who have brought lasting fame to the state of Alabama through the disciplines that comprise the College. The tie that binds this year’s honorees is family.

“Together this family of inductees forms a special class indeed, individuals who, often at great risk, breathed life into the First Amendment and made our democracy stronger for it,” said Dr. Culpepper Clark, C&IS dean.

“These remarkable individuals have had a profound impact on the social, economic, political and cultural life of Alabama and the nation through the disciplines of communication,” Clark said. “These men and women represent the finest the state has to offer. Their commitment to their profession has raised the sights of us all in the communication and information disciplines.”

The Communication Hall of Fame Gallery is located in the rotunda of Reese Phifer Hall on the UA campus. Permanent archives will be established and maintained for the collection of memorabilia related to the lives and careers of those chosen for placement in the Hall of Fame.

The College of Communication & Information Sciences is among the largest and most prestigious communication colleges in the nation. Graduating more than 12,000 students, C&IS is consistently ranked among the top 10 in number of doctoral degrees awarded and in many of its research programs. C&IS graduates have won four of the six Pulitzer Prizes awarded to University of Alabama alumni, and the forensics and debate squad, housed within the College, has garnered 14 national championships.

2002 College of Communication and Information Sciences Hall of Fame Inductees

GOULD M. BEECH (1913 – 2000)

Later in life, working out of his real estate office in the quaint river town of Magnolia Springs, Ala., Gould Beech could have been mistaken for a retired Chamber of Commerce president or banker.

It is hard to imagine that he was once branded a “radical” and “dangerous leftist” for the positions he took and that he was forced from Alabama into political exile in Texas. Today some of his “radical” positions, such as racial equality, have been accepted in his home state. Others, such as reforming the tax code and the constitution, have not.

Beech was born in Florence and raised in Foley and Montgomery. He attended The University of Alabama, where he met his future wife, Mary Foster, in a chemistry class. Beech was a journalism major and served as editor of The Crimson White. Three other Hall of Fame inductees served under him: Mel Allen, later to become the Voice of the Yankees, Hazel Brannon Smith, first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing, and Carroll Kilpatrick of Washington Post fame.

Beech worked at The Anniston Star and then became associate editor at The Montgomery Advertiser, where, under the tutelage of Grover Hall (Hall of Fame inductee 1998), he wrote forceful editorials against racism, the KKK and in favor of anti-lynching laws.

After serving in World War II, Beech partnered with Aubrey Williams to publish The Southern Farmer magazine and used it to argue for political reforms. He was a confidante of Big Jim Folsom in the 1940s and became a savvy political consultant even before the phrase was coined, helping Folsom articulate his populist message. This made Beech an enemy of powerful Black Belt politicians. When Folsom nominated Beech to the Board of Trustees at Auburn University (then Alabama Polytechnic Institute), he was attacked by the legislature and denied his seat.

Gould and Mary Beech moved to Houston and continued their work for peaceful integration and on behalf of black candidates. Beech was instrumental in Barbara Jordan’s first political races. After years of scorn from people in their home state, the Beeches finally returned to Alabama because of their abiding love for the state. They had a vision for this state, and they paid dearly for it.

“I was cursed or blessed, as the case may be, with being able to see things as they really were in the South,” Beech said. “Even then I was not tempted to leave it.”

HUGO L. BLACK (1886 – 1971)

Hugo Black remains one of the First Amendment’s greatest champions.

Raised in Clay County and a 1906 graduate of The University of Alabama School of Law, Black practiced law in Birmingham, often representing industrial workers and striking miners. He vowed to win election to the U.S. Senate by age 40, and he did so in 1926. He served as President Franklin Roosevelt’s top lieutenant in the Senate, tirelessly arguing on behalf of New Deal legislation and programs.

He was Roosevelt’s first appointment to the Supreme Court and served for 34 years, 26 of them as senior justice. His deeply held and cherished beliefs about free speech, individual liberties, racial equality and trial by jury led him to cast countless votes and write numerous opinions that made him a political pariah in his home state.

Never yielding to social pressures, this very Southern justice, whose written opinions often borrowed lines from his favorite hymns, never hesitated to call segregated schools unconstitutional and wrong.

Black demonstrated a great love for the Constitution, and carried a dog-eared copy of it with him so he could quote from it liberally.

For Black, nothing would substitute for a literal reading of the revered document. But there was one thing he loved almost as much as the Constitution — a vigorous and spirited game of tennis. He could be found on “the other court” almost daily until his death in 1971 at age 85.

“The American Constitution,” he wrote, “is no accident of history, but it is the evolutionary product of man’s striving throughout past ages to protect himself from tyrannical kings, potentates, and rulers … A written constitution was chosen … because this was the best way to protect minority rights from the tyranny of the majority.”

In Alabama, liberal democracy has always been a frail creature. Perhaps because of that frailty, Alabama has produced some of its greatest champions, many of whom are represented in the College of Communication and Information Sciences Hall of Fame. If anything, Hugo Black is parent to them all. It is fitting that his countenance will now grace the inside of the rotunda of the University’s Old Union Building, Reese Phifer Hall.

EDWIN C. BRIDGES (1945 – )

The Alabama Department of Archives and History was the first state archive in the nation when it was established in 1901. Today, under the visionary leadership of Ed Bridges, it continues as a model for archives, libraries and institutions that preserve the records and artifacts that tell our nation’s story. “What I have loved most is the intersection of history and current policy, and the way they come together in an archive,” says Bridges.

Born and raised in Bainbridge, Ga., Bridges nearly followed his father and grandfather in becoming a country doctor. But an extraordinary college professor, the late William Leverette, a native of Selma, became a mentor and gave his pupil an abiding love of history. Bridges received his undergraduate degree at Furman, and his master’s and doctorate at The University of Chicago. He taught at Georgia Tech and did historical research before joining the Georgia Department of Archives and History, eventually becoming its assistant director.

In 1982 he became director of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, the only person from outside the state to hold the position. “In a sense Ed was the quintessential outsider in a state that likes insiders,” says historian Wayne Flynt. “But no one now can think of history in Alabama without thinking of Ed Bridges.”

At the Archives, Bridges modernized the catalog and descriptions of collections, improved reference services and stressed community outreach. He secured funding for an addition to the building, which will provide much needed space for the interpretation of Alabama’s history.

A respected leader in his field, Bridges helped develop the University of Pittsburgh Institute for Advanced Archival Studies, represented the United States in an exchange with archivists from the Soviet Union, has published in journals devoted to archives and history, and served on national and international organizations devoted to archives, libraries and historical research.

Bridges is also a tremendous asset for his adopted state. His work with Leadership Alabama is a perfect illustration of his talent for placing history in service of public policy. “What Ed has done with his staff is to take the archives out into the community,” says Flynt. “He’s made it a resource in every community in the state of Alabama.”

Not surprisingly, others, most recently the Truman Presidential Library, have tried to lure him away. His decision to stay in the state that he has done so much to cultivate is good fortune indeed.

NEIL O. DAVIS (1914 – 2000)

A prestigious Neiman Fellowship to Harvard University had never been awarded to a weekly newspaperman until Neil Davis received one in 1941.

Davis had shown his spirit and backbone even as student editor of The Plainsman at Auburn University. He spoke out clearly and forcefully when the administration attempted to stifle the strong support he had shown for the New Deal in his newspaper. It was not the last time he would be threatened for his independent thinking.

Born in Hartford, Ala., in 1914, he graduated from Geneva County High School. Nearly half of the 27 graduates went to college. At Auburn he met Henrietta Worsley, a Plainsman associate editor. She became his wife, served as chief reporter and associate editor and published their paper, The Lee County Bulletin, for the three years he served in World War II.

Davis championed unskilled rural workers, advocated strong public education, and fought against the poll tax, discrimination and segregation. His well-reasoned and cogent editorials helped convince many in his community that integration was not only inevitable, it was right. In 1964, he purchased The Tuskegee News, and despite criticism and attacks from George Wallace, he continued to irritate and provoke those who clung to the old order.

He served as president of the Alabama Press Association, was an adjunct professor of journalism at Auburn and was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to the Presidential Commission on Rural Poverty. His editorials were twice nominated for Pulitzer Prizes.

“He never did like the new computers and things we brought into the operation,” says Paul Davis, publisher of The Tuskegee News, “but he was on the cutting edge when it came to writing editorials and oftentimes his work would appear in The New York Times and Boston Globe because he was so well respected.”

Lee County, The Tuskegee Institute, and Auburn University in particular are better for Neil Davis having “put down his bucket” where he was. The well he drew from nourished a world of opportunity for generations of Alabamians.

VIRGINIA F. DURR (1903 – 1999)

By all rights Virginia Durr should have lived a life of privilege and ease. She was born to Birmingham, Ala.’s “magic circle” of wealth power.

However, her life began to change while attending Wellesley, when this daughter of a Birmingham minister was required to share a table with African-Americans or leave school. She returned home with a broadened perspective. The “deep-eyed Southern bigot,” as she described her youthful self, would become a powerful activist, organizer, and leader in the civil rights movement.

Her sister married Hugo Black, and she married Clifford Durr (Hall of Fame 1998), an attorney who was impressed by her tenacious work in a law library. The Durrs went to Washington when Clifford Durr served in President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration. While there, Virginia Durr began her tireless work against the poll tax, a protracted battle for black suffrage that did not end until passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As a founding member of the Southern Conference on Human Welfare in 1938, Virginia Durr was vilified as a communist agitator by no less than Bull Connor who tried to break up their integrated meeting in Birmingham.

Her criticism of the Korean War cost Clifford Durr his position in Washington, and when the couple returned to Alabama they were outcasts, branded as socialists and worse. In 1954 Virginia Durr was called for questioning before the Senate’s anti-communist subcommittee. When Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to move to the back of a Montgomery bus, the Durrs helped bail her out of jail and from the first night of her ordeal offered wise counsel and advice. Her “upbringing of privilege did not prohibit her from wanting equality for all people,” Parks said upon her friend’s death. “She was a lady and a scholar, and I shall miss her.”

In 1997, Virginia Durr received an honorary doctorate from The University of Alabama, where her husband had been a Rhodes Scholar graduate. To the end, she remained a passionate, articulate, and tireless advocate for justice. “The problem is,” she said, “once you open a gate, there’s another and another gate beyond each one. It makes you think you want to live forever …”

FRED L. SHUTTLESWORTH (1922 – )

“Reverend Shuttlesworth was the real leader of the civil rights movement in Alabama,” says Cleo Thomas, attorney and former University of Alabama trustee.

Shuttlesworth was tougher than dynamite. A powerful blast tore apart his Birmingham home, but he emerged from the rubble even more determined to fight for justice. He was brutally beaten by a mob when he tried to enroll his children in an all-white school. Seriously injured when slammed against a wall by the terrible force of a water cannon, he rose from his hospital bed to re-energize the Birmingham movement at its crucial hour. His unyielding quest for justice made him one of the most hated men by those who hid under white robes or behind tarnished badges.

Born in Birmingham and educated at Selma University and Alabama State, he was known as “the cussin’ preacher,” partly because of the fire and passion he brought to his churches. In 1956, he created the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, and the following year he joined Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others to form the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

When the movement’s leaders became indecisive or faltered, he prodded them into action. Shuttlesworth was an irresistible force that could not be contained, either by Bull Connor, who jailed him for going too far, or by other black leaders who felt he was going too fast. Dr. King called him “the most courageous civil rights fighter in the South.” If King was the movement’s Moses, Shuttlesworth was its Lion of Judah.

The bravest preacher in Birmingham moved to Cincinnati in 1966 where he continues to serve as pastor of the Greater New Light Baptist Church and remains involved in progressive social initiatives.

“He really sets a high standard for the moral life, for what we can do together,” Thomas says. “And he did it with such spirit and such zeal and such confidence, such absolute knowledge for the rightness of what he was doing, and fearlessness. And so he stands for goodness. He stands for leading the examined life.”

Editor’s Note: For e-mailed inductee photo sketches, contact Elizabeth Smith in media relations at 205/348-3782.