As the child of immigrants and the only Jewish family in a Queens, N.Y., neighborhood of mostly Irish and Italian households, Albert Shanker grew up aware of the outsider’s status. He was picked on for his appearance (6 foot 3 inches by age 12), his language (Yiddish only when he began first grade) and his ethnicity (at age eight, bullies put a noose around his neck, shouted anti-Semitic insults at him and left him hanging, briefly, from a tree). His intolerance for discrimination was thus bred early on; it fostered his uncompromising commitment to equality, equal opportunity and civil and human rights.

Shanker was a charter member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), joining in the late 1940s when he was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. As a CORE member and head of the Socialist Study Club, he led picket lines against segregated theaters and restaurants in Urbana.

In New York a decade later, Shanker’s involvement with building the teachers union dovetailed with the growing momentum of the civil rights movement. "Shanker had his feet planted firmly in both worlds," says U.S. Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), who met Shanker then. Each movement needed the other: Civil rights leaders sought Shanker’s common-sense counsel on strategies to integrate the schools and Shanker sought their support during tough battles over collective bargaining.

Norman Hill, president of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, remembers meeting Shanker in those early years when Hill was on the staff of CORE and was working with others to integrate schools. "He tried to point out feasible ways to integrate, given the nature and context of New York City schools. He was clearly speaking as someone sympathetic to the cause, not as a union leader. ‘If I were in your shoes,’ he would say, ‘this is what I would do.’"

In 1963, as treasurer of the United Federation of Teachers, Shanker saw to it that the union endorsed the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and sent buses and people down to participate. It was at this time that [former AFT COPE director] Rachelle Horowitz met Shanker. She was a young aide to the march’s organizers, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin. She witnessed the beginning of an alliance between the three men that would prove crucial in the battles of the next several years.

Shanker came to greatly admire Rustin as a "special hero" and, in 1993, spoke of him in terms many would say characterized Shanker himself:

"The great thing about Rustin was that he didn’t put up his finger to see which way the wind was blowing. He had the guts to say what he felt was right, no matter how unpopular it was."

The following year, Shanker became president of the UFT, and Rustin became director of the newly established A. Philip Randolph Institute (APRI). The UFT was the first union to support the Institute, which was founded to foster the "Negro-labor alliance." Shanker served as APRI treasurer, and the UFT provided office space for the next 15 years. The APRI Education Fund would soon after set up the innovative Recruitment and Training Program, an apprenticeship program created to bring more blacks into the building and construction trades. Shanker worked with Earnest Green, the program’s first director (also the first black student to graduate from Little Rock, Arkansas’, Central High School), by getting union members to identify candidates in the schools and prepare them for the tests that would lead to apprenticeships.

"One thing that always impressed me about Al—he was a straight shooter. He didn’t mince words or have trouble being focused as to what he wanted to accomplish," says Green, now the managing director of Lehman Brothers’ public finance office. "Al was the bridge between myself and Harry Van Arsdale, Jr. [president of the City Labor Council]. I owe a piece of my career to being involved with Al."

Another who worked on the apprenticeship program was Alexis Herman, now the nominee for U.S. Secretary of Labor. "Bayard Rustin taught me that with skill, intelligence and persuasion (and some cunning), even the most intransigent local union business agent could be brought around. Al Shanker showed me that if you’re honest, make sense, set high standards and never give up, you can build a good and successful program."

During the following key years of the civil rights movement, the union was active on many fronts: sending books, materials and staff to Mississippi Freedom Schools; raising money for station wagons and food to send to Selma, Ala.; sending hundreds of unionists south to register black voters; and lobbying, with other unions and organizations, for passage of major civil rights legislation. One of Shanker’s proudest moments was traveling to Selma to present a check from the UFT to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Three years later, King would symbolically return the favor by mailing a $10 check to help post Shanker’s bail when he was jailed for leading a strike. Shanker hung the framed check on his wall.

One of the most difficult times for the union came in 1968, with the Ocean Hill-Brownsville strikes. Those strikes, over the issue of local control versus teachers’ due-process rights, closed city schools for a total of 55 days in the fall of 1968 and polarized the city. It caused a temporary break between the union and many civil rights leaders, although Rustin and A. Philip Randolph supported their friend Shanker throughout. Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women, met Shanker during that period and began a friendship, she says, she "cherishes."

"I understood why he was doing what he did and why he continued to do it," she says. "In the civil rights movement, he was always a great supporter. He was one of the people we could always count on, not only through what he did to advance labor, but to advance human and civil rights."

Says Norman Hill, who was associate director of the APRI at that time, "We supported Shanker because of our belief and commitment to the trade union movement and to the principle of due process."

In a letter to a critic, Randolph, former president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, wrote: "I am sure you are aware of the fact that black workers, until they began to organize in the unions, were the first fired and the last hired. They had no rights anyone was bound to respect. I could not very well refuse to support the teachers’ right to due process and job security since it is not only a basic part of our democratic life but indispensable for the ability of workers to hold our jobs."

In the end, the union won, the teachers were reinstated, but the conflict took a toll. "Al was on the front lines of the civil rights movement," says Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton. "Those were his politics; those were his principles." Over time, she adds, the effect of the collision of concerns in the district dissipated.

Soon after, the UFT successfully organized the paraprofessionals in that district. There was irony in that victory. The para unit was made up mostly of black and Hispanic women activists—from the very community that had fought the teachers. They responded to the message "What Shanker did for the teachers, he’ll do for you," and, in a close election, voted for the UFT.

As leader of the UFT and then of the national union, Shanker continued his commitment to civil rights, marching in support of jailed Farm Workers Union president Cesar Chavez, demonstrating against apartheid in South Africa, raising thousands for the NAACP’s Mississippi boycott case and for African famine relief, and lobbying for passage of progressive civil rights acts, federal recognition of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, and the Voting Rights Act extension. His support of human rights extended overseas with programs to support free trade labor movements in Eastern Europe, Africa and Central America.

"Al’s first legacy is a principled, consistent commitment to democracy," says Hill. "This was not an abstract principle, but one he exercised through effective organizational leadership and intellect."

"He had the unique ability to move matters forward focused on the greater issue," says Norton. "So he could think of a principled way to go at reform while maintaining the rights of his own people. That takes a kind of brilliance not floating around anywhere."