Saturday, January 26, 2013

Eugene C. Patterson, Editor and Civil Rights Crusader, Dies at 89

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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/14/us/eugene-c-patterson-editor-and-civil-rights-crusader-dies-at-89.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

From the site:

Mr. Patterson succeeded the celebrated Ralph McGill as editor of The Constitution, and from 1960 to 1968 was a voice of conscience and progressive politics on the editorial page. He wrote thousands of columns, many of which addressed white Southerners directly, like letters from home, and cumulatively painted a portrait of the South during the civil rights struggle.

Raised on Georgia farm and serving as a tank commander in World War II, he worked at small-town newspapers in Texas and Georgia as a young man, and although he moved up to wire service jobs in New York and London, he had been steeped in the droll wit and down-home sociability of the South.

There were no simple solutions to the racial problems, and he offered none. Instead, he drew poignant scenes of suffering and loss to condemn violence and miscarriages of justice. And he explored themes of courage and questions of responsibility that went beyond mindless acts of racism to challenge a people with traditions of decency.

At the ruins of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., where a bomb killed four girls on Sept. 15, 1963, he crafted his most famous column, “A Flower for the Graves.” Walter Cronkite was so moved that he asked Mr. Patterson to read it on the “CBS Evening News.”

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