Savannah Civil Rights Icon: Earl T. Shinhoster

Savannah has always had a strong and influential black community. So it comes as no surprise that they have had a significant influence on the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), nationally and regionally. One such figure was Earl T. Shinhoster. Shinhoster was born in Yamacraw Village July 5, 1950. At the early age of thirteen, he became a member of the Savannah NAACP chapter, joining its energetic youth council that formed the vanguard of Savannah's civil rights movement. The Savannah NAACP was led by the renowned civil rights leader W. W. Law at the time. Shinhoster was elected president of the Savannah NAACP Youth Council just three years later.

Shinhoster left Savannah to attend Morehouse College and Cleveland State University. After college he returned to Georgia in 1975 to join Georgia governor George Busbee's staff as director of the Office of Human Affairs. He returned to a leadership position of the NAACP in 1977 when he was named director of the NAACP's southeast region office in Atlanta. He held this position until he left in 1994-95 to serve as Interim Executive Director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). During his interim status he was a strong candidate to serve as the permanent director but eventually lost out to Benjamin Chavis. Instead he was named national field secretary of the NAACP. As it turned out the Chavis chapter as leader of the NAACP would be short lived.

The organization, which had fallen on hard times, saw its financial condition worsened under Chavis's command. He was forced to resign after a little more than a year. The board named Shinhoster acting executive director. Shinhoster, during this time, distinguished himself as an adept administrator. He slashed the organization's debt by $1 million and increased the membership from 600,000 to nearly 1 million in little more than a year. But once again it was not his time; the board selected Kweisi Mfume to fill the NAACP's top position in December 1995.

Shinhoster parted ways with the NAACP at this time. He worked as a field director with the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs in Ghana. He then worked promoting voter education for Georgia's secretary of state office in 1996. Shinhoster finally returned to the NAACP as the national director of voter empowerment in 2000.

Unfortunately, his time had come. Shinhoster was killed in a car accident near Montgomery, Alabama. He was escorting the First Lady of Liberia when his vehicle, a Ford Explorer with Firestone tires, experienced a tire blowout and rolled over. Similar Ford and Firestone tire blowouts throughout the country caused a recall of the tires. The families of the victims of the tire blowout sued Ford and Firestone, which ended in a settlement out of court.

In 2001 the Georgia legislature designated the Earl T. Shinhoster Interchange and the Earl T. Shinhoster Bridge to honor him of him here in Savannah. In 2001 the Women's Organizational Movement for Equality Now erected a memorial in Alabama to Shinhoster and dedicated the stretch of Interstate 85 where he died as the "Earl T. Shinhoster Parkway."
 
 His contribution was noted by then NAACP president and CEO Kweisi Mfume when he said “Earl was one of the NAACP leaders who made this organization work he was part of the NAACP family for all of his adult life and he will surely be missed.'' Shinhoster will be remembered as one of Savannah’s proud sons of the civil rights movement. He was in the direct NAACP lineage of Savannah’s remarkable civil rights leaders Ralph Mark Gilbert and W.W. Law.
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