Word: mcgill
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...Ralph McGill was no crusader. He considered his columns and editorials to be merely common-sense appeals to the humanitarian impulses of his fellow Southerners. A softspoken, always courteous man, he preferred understatement. He put down Alabama's Governor George Wallace's 1963 defiance at the schoolhouse door as "a little man standing alone in his diminishing circle." Fittingly, his last column, an open letter to new HEW Secretary Robert Finch, was a low-key plea that the Federal Government not yield to Southern plans to perpetuate dual school systems for Negroes and whites. "The freedom of choice...
Rastus. Only when an outrageous act angered him did McGill drop his civility. After the assassination of Robert Kennedy, he assailed the "abscesses in America's society-the jackals, the cowards, the haters, the failures who hate achievers, the yapping feist pack that tries to drown out truth, those who dislike Jews, Negroes, Catholics, liberals." He won a Pulitzer Prize for a 1958 editorial that deplored the bombings of an Atlanta synagogue and a newly integrated Tennessee high school as the work of "rabid, mad-dog minds" and warned: "When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people...
Unlike many Southern liberals who wish to be judged by the enemies they make, McGill was pained by the hatred he drew. His mailbox and front yard were bombed and raked by rifle fire. Telephoned threats often awoke him throughout the night. Crosses were burned outside his home. Redneck politicians drew votes by railing against "Rastus McGill," "Red Ralph (only a kaw-muh-nist talks like thet)" and "those lyin' Atlanta papers." McGill could detest the ideas of his enemies, but not the men themselves, nor could those who got to know him fail to respect...
...McGill is likely to be remembered as the most famous Southern editor since the Constitution's own Henry Grady pressed for the birth of a "New South" in the 1880s. Yet McGill, a Tennessee-born farm boy who always seemed embarrassed by his worldwide acclaim, preferred to think of himself as a reporter. Once a sportswriter, he later covered Hitler's invasion of Austria, the Nürnberg war-crime trials, 18 national political conventions-and he could also be seen scrambling through smoke-choked buildings on fire stories. Indeed, as the Constitution's editor, and particularly...
Died. Ralph McGill, 70, Pulitzer-prizewinning editorial writer and publisher of the Atlanta Constitution (see THE PRESS...