Civil rights attorney Arthur Shores' life told by daughters in new book

Shores.jpgHelen Shores Lee and Barbara Shores stand on the front porch of the family house overlooking Center Street in Birmingham. (Photo by Linda Stelter, The Birmingham News)

The red-brick house on Center Street has the feel of the 1950s about it, with the footsteps of civil rights legends still seemingly echoing across the hardwood floor.

The house where civil rights attorney Ar­thur Shores lived from 1952 until his death in 1996 was bombed twice in 1963. The dyna­mite explosions went off two weeks apart, in August and September, in the month leading up to the Sept. 15 bombing at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that killed four girls who were friends of the Shores family.

In 1965, a bomb set to go off at the time of the start of the Selma march was found in the yard of the Shores home by Shores’ wife, Theodora. It was defused by a bomb squad.

The bombings took a toll on the Shores family. Theodora suffered a concussion in the second explosion. A beloved family dog was killed in the first, an emotional blow to Shores’ younger daughter, Barbara, a teen­ager at the time.

In "The Gentle Giant of Dynamite Hill," a new book about their father, published by Zondervan and written with Denise George, Shores’ daughters Helen Shores Lee and Barbara Shores recall their family’s struggles and triumphs, buoyed by faith.

Lee and her sister Bar­bara sat in a room of the house this week and dis­cussed their father’s perse­verance and dedication to achieving justice.

"It was our Christian faith that got us through this ordeal," Lee said. "My dad prayed constantly. We witnessed that."

"He walked his faith," Barbara Shores said. "He didn’t walk in fear."

Arthur Shores, a former high school principal in Birmingham, became a lawyer in 1937 and quickly emerged as one of the na­tion’s top civil rights attor­neys, handling voting rights cases in Macon County in the late 1930s and a police brutality case in 1941 in Birmingham that made his reputation. He fought for equal pay for black teachers and de­fended a black man ac­cused of raping a white woman.

"He went all over the state," said Lee, a former clinical psychologist who also changed careers to be­come a lawyer and now a Jefferson County judge.

"He believed in the legal system and he brought about change through the legal system," said Barbara Shores, executive director of the Jefferson County Of­fice of Senior Citizens Serv­ices.

In the 1940s, there were more than 50 unsolved bombings in Smithfield, a neighborhood just west of downtown Birmingham.

The city of Birmingham had an ordinance that made it illegal for blacks to live in houses on the west side of Center Street. Those who crossed the line had their houses bombed or burned.

"It was the dividing line in the city," Barbara Shores said.

Symbolic of his life, Ar­thur Shores moved his family to a house on the east side of Center Street, right at the center of the action.

White gangs used to drive by at night, shouting racial epithets as the Shores family sat on their stone front porch. At age 13, Helen grabbed her fa­ther’s Colt .45 pistol and fired a shot in their direc­tion. Her father grabbed her arm and deflected the shot safely away, warning his daughter that she could go to prison for life for such an act.

In 1953, Shores rep­resented Autherine Lucy and Pollie Myers, the first black students to enroll and be accepted at the University of Alabama.

When they arrived on cam­pus to register, the dean’s office rejected them. Fel­low NAACP attorney Thur­good Marshall, a future U.S. Supreme Court jus­tice, stayed at the Shores house as they worked on the case.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1954 in the Brown v. Board of Education case that segregated schools must integrate. Shores and Marshall used the Lucy-Myers case as a test of the ruling. In 1955, Judge Ho­bart Grooms ordered the University of Alabama to accept Lucy and Myers.

The university hired inves­tigators who discovered that Myers had been preg­nant and not married at the time of her enrollment, so she was rejected based on the university’s moral code. Lucy enrolled again in 1956. The university banned her from living on campus or eating in the school cafeteria.

After three days of riot­ing by Ku Klux Klansmen and other protesters, the university banned Lucy from returning to class. For the next seven years, the University of Alabama re­mained segregated.

During the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56, Shores represented its leader, the Rev. Martin Lu­ther King Jr., when the pas­tor of Dexter Avenue Bap­tist Church was indicted for leading the boycott.

King was convicted based on a 1921 city statute out­lawing boycotts. King spent time in jail rather than pay the $1,000 fine.

Shores and other NAACP attorneys representing James Hood and Vivian Malone finally broke through the segregation at the University of Alabama in 1963, despite Gov. George Wallace’s infamous stand in the schoolhouse door.

"That was one of his greatest moments, when Wallace was asked to step aside," Lee said of her fa­ther.

Malone became the first black graduate of the uni­versity and Hood later earned a doctorate there.

Lee recalls going to fed­eral court with her father during the Lucy case. At the end of his career, she entered law practice with him.

Through the hardest times, Shores always made it home to his family on Saturdays, to take his daughters to a western movie at the theater on Eighth Street North, and to eat his favorite dinner of a mustard-covered hot dog and fresh-squeezed lemon­ade.

"It was a lot of fun times," said Barbara Shores. "We had a great family life."

The Shores home was di­rectly across the street from the First Congrega­tional Church, where Shores was Sunday school superintendent, deacon and trustee. At the end of his life, his daughters pushed him to church in a wheelchair. He died in the house on Center Street, an unofficial museum and landmark of the civil rights movement where Barbara still lives. The bombs cracked the bricks, but the family and Shores legacy endured.

Shores was only five-foot-three, 145 pounds, but he was a giant in life, his daughters say.

"He always would come in at night to hear us pray; we learned by his example by listening to him pray," Lee said.

"He counted on his faith to sustain him through all of this, and it did," Barbara Shores said. "He believed in the power of prayer. He left us a godly heritage of faith and service. That was his legacy to us."

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