Pulitzer Prize-Winning Newspaper Editor Eugene Patterson Dead at 89; War Hero Came Home from Beating Hitler to Destroy His Own Nation; Spent Last Years Censoring God

 

This 1984 photo shows Eugene Patterson in St. Petersburg, Fla. Newspaper editor and columnist Eugene Patterson, who helped fellow Southern whites understand the civil rights movement, has died, Saturday, Jan. 12, 2013. He was 89 (AP Photo/The Tampa Bay Times)

Patterson committed sedition, in publishing the Pentagon Papers; he later founded the racial socialist Poynter propaganda institute; his “A Flower for the Graves” column helped lay the ideological groundwork for the racial socialist system of Jim Snow.
Posted by Nicholas Stix

Pulitzer Prize-winning editor Eugene Patterson, 89, dies
By Mitch Stacy
Associated Press/El Paso Times
January 13, 2013, 12:15:59 a.m. MST

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) - Eugene Patterson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor and columnist who helped fellow Southern whites understand the civil rights movement, eloquently reminding the silent majority of its complicity in racial violence, died Saturday evening at his Florida home. He was 89.

Patterson was surrounded by family and friends when he died of complications from prostate cancer, according to B.J. Phillips, a spokeswoman for the family.

Patterson was editor of the Atlanta Constitution from 1960 to 1968, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for editorial writing and doing a signed column every day for eight years. He wrote about the civil rights movement at a time when many Southern newspapers wouldn't aggressively cover it.

Patterson's Sept, 16, 1963, column about the Birmingham, Ala., church bombing that killed four girls, titled "A Flower for the Graves," was so moving he was asked by Walter Cronkite to read it on the "CBS Evening News."

"A Negro mother wept in the street Sunday morning in front of a Baptist Church in Birmingham," Patterson began the column. "In her hand she held a shoe, one shoe, from the foot of her dead child. We hold that shoe with her.

"Every one of us in the white South holds that small shoe in his hand. ... We who go on electing politicians who heat the kettles of hate. ... (The bomber) feels right now that he has been a hero. He is only guilty of murder. He thinks he has pleased us. We of the white South who know better are the ones who must take a harsher judgment."

"It was the high point of my life," Patterson said in a June 2006 interview from his home in St. Petersburg. "It was the only time I was absolutely sure I was right. They were not telling the truth to people and we tried to change that."

Patterson said he was fortunate to work for a newspaper with "deep pockets" and "enlightened" leadership that encouraged him to use his voice.

"We were rather rare editors in the South at that time," Patterson said of himself and Constitution Publisher Ralph McGill, who both wrote columns. He worked under McGill, himself a Pulitzer winner in 1959, and then succeeded him at the helm of the Constitution four years later.

"Mr. Patterson's contributions to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Atlanta community and to journalism were enormous. We benefit still from his work and legacy," said Editor Kevin G. Riley in a statement emailed to The Associated Press.

In the 2004 Discovery Times Channel documentary "Someone's Watching," Patterson recalled being asked by the FBI to print damaging information on the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"He said we have information from our informant (and that means in FBI lingo, a wiretap) that Dr. King is being unfaithful to his wife," Patterson said. "And I said to him, 'We're not a peephole journal. We don't print that kind of stuff.'"

When he was approached a second time, Patterson recalled, "I finally said to him, 'Look, the news story here is not Dr. King's life. It's the misuse of the federal police power by the FBI in trying to damage an American citizen.'"

In 1968, Patterson joined The Washington Post and served three years as its managing editor, playing a central role in the publication of the Pentagon Papers.

After leaving the Post he spent a year teaching at Duke University.

He became editor of The St. Petersburg Times and its Washington publication, Congressional Quarterly, in 1972 and was later chief executive officer of The St. Petersburg Times Co. Under his leadership, the Times won two Pulitzer Prizes and became known as one of the top newspapers in the country.

Times owner Nelson Poynter, who died in 1978, chose Patterson to ensure his controlling stock in the newspaper company was used to fund a school for journalists then called the Modern Media Insititute. It is now known as the Poynter Institute, which owns the Tampa Bay Times (formerly The St. Petersburg Times).

"A person - one person - had to be entrusted with fulfilling what Mr. Poynter intended," said Roy Peter Clark, the school's first faculty member. "That meant he had to be trusted enough not to sell the newspaper to Knight Ridder or Gannett or take away millions of dollars for personal use. He had to be totally trustworthy, so Mr. Poynter chose Mr. Patterson."

A champion of high ethical standards for journalists, Patterson insisted the St. Petersburg Times play the story prominently on the front page when he was arrested for driving while intoxicated.

In 1981, Patterson refused to join other Pulitzer board members in awarding Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke the prize for her story of a young heroin addict.

Patterson said at the time the story didn't "smell right," and said at best the story was "an aberration," tainted by Cooke's promise not to disclose information that could help save a child's life.

Cooke had to return the Pulitzer two days later after acknowledging she had fabricated the story.

Patterson retired from the Times and Poynter in 1988.

"There are several generations of journalists who are journalists because of him," said Phillips, who was hired by Patterson in 1967 and worked with him at The Post. "A lot of people looked up to him and imagined themselves trying to be like him. It was a good standard."

A collection of Patterson's Atlanta Constitution columns was published in book form in 2002 as "The Changing South of Gene Patterson: Journalism and Civil Rights, 1960-1968."

Patterson was born in 1923 in Georgia, the son of a schoolteacher and a bank cashier who later lost his job during the Great Depression. He grew up on a small farm, and recalled toiling "behind a plow drawn by two mules across 50 acres of isolation." School, fishing and literature were his only means of escape.

Those experiences in the segregated South would help shape his later world view. Patterson "understood the intense feelings that segregationists had, the great fear they had, that their way of life was about to end," said Hank Klibanoff director of the journalism program at Emory University and co-author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on press coverage of the civil rights movement. "But in the end (he) said that was not reason enough to resist."

Klibanoff said that when black churches were burned in southwestern Georgia in 1962, Patterson was "deeply disturbed" and wrote a column tweaking white people who claim to be religious but support segregation. He called on whites to raise money to rebuild the churches, spawning an effort that raised $10,000 and later prompted a visit by King.

"When he sat down to write, that conviction came out. And it came out in just a very, very powerfully written way," Klibanoff said of Patterson, who went on to serve as vice chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Klibanoff, a former managing editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, said he received a note from Patterson recently in response to a letter he'd written him.

Patterson graduated from the University of Georgia in 1943, then served in the Army in Europe. His platoon was in the thick of fighting during the Battle of the Bulge, the final German offensive of World War II. He received a Silver Star for gallantry in action and a Bronze Star with oak leaf cluster for heroic achievement, according to The Tampa Bay Times.

His first reporting job was at the Temple (Texas) Daily Telegram. He later went on to work for United Press in Atlanta, New York and London. It was there that he wrote one of his most famous leads, on a story about Ernest Hemingway being feared dead in an airplane crash in Uganda.

"Ernest Hemingway came out of the jungle today carrying a bunch of bananas and a bottle of gin," Patterson wrote.

Even in his last years, Patterson spent time editing and writing. One of his final projects was cutting 600,000 words from the King James Bible. He reasoned that the Bible is full of great stories that are hard to follow.

Clark wrote of that endeavor: "It turns out that even Moses needed an editor."

[Thanks to reader-researcher RC for this article.]


The Poynter Institute: http://www.poynter.org/



Eugene Patterson's “A Flower for the Graves” column
By Eugene Patterson
Posted: January 12, 2013, 10:41 p.m.

Eugene Patterson's most famous column appeared in the Atlanta Constitution on Sept. 16, 1963, the day after four black girls died in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. The headline was "A Flower for the Graves." That evening Patterson read the column on the CBS Evening News at the request of anchor Walter Cronkite.


A Negro mother wept in the street Sunday morning in front of a Baptist Church in Birmingham. In her hand she held a shoe, one shoe, from the foot of her dead child. We hold that shoe with her.

Every one of us in the white South holds that small shoe in his hand.

It is too late to blame the sick criminals who handled the dynamite. The FBI and the police can deal with that kind. The charge against them is simple. They killed four children.

Only we can trace the truth, Southerner — you and I. We broke those children's bodies.

We watched the stage set without staying it. We listened to the prologue unbestirred.

We saw the curtain opening with disinterest. We have heard the play.

We — who go on electing politicians who heat the kettles of hate.

We — who raise no hand to silence the mean and little men who have their nigger jokes.

We — who stand aside in imagined rectitude and let the mad dogs that run in every society slide their leashes from our hand, and spring.

We — the heirs of a proud South, who protest its worth and demand it recognition — we are the ones who have ducked the difficult, skirted the uncomfortable, caviled at the challenge, resented the necessary, rationalized the unacceptable, and created the day surely when these children would die.

This is no time to load our anguish onto the murderous scapegoat who set the cap in dynamite of our own manufacture.

He didn't know any better.

Somewhere in the dim and fevered recess of an evil mind he feels right now that he has been a hero. He is only guilty of murder. He thinks he has pleased us.

We of the white South who know better are the ones who must take a harsher judgment.

We, who know better, created a climate for child-killing by those who don't.

We hold that shoe in our hand, Southerner. Let us see it straight, and look at the blood on it. Let us compare it with the unworthy speeches of Southern public men who have traduced the Negro; match it with the spectacle of shrilling children whose parents and teachers turned them free to spit epithets at small huddles of Negro school children for a week before this Sunday in Birmingham; hold up the shoe and look beyond it to the state house in Montgomery where the official attitudes of Alabama have been spoken in heat and anger.

Let us not lay the blame on some brutal fool who didn't know any better.

We know better. We created the day. We bear the judgment. May God have mercy on the poor South that has so been led. May what has happened hasten the day when the good South, which does live and has great being, will rise to this challenge of racial understanding and common humanity, and in the full power of its unasserted courage, assert itself.

The Sunday school play at Birmingham is ended. With a weeping Negro mother, we stand in the bitter smoke and hold a shoe. If our South is ever to be what we wish it to be, we will plant a flower of nobler resolve for the South now upon these four small graves that we dug.

[Last modified: Jan 12, 2013 10:56 PM]