Word: mcgills
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...EDITOR of the moderate Constitution from 1942 to 1960, and publisher since then, McGill has watched, coaxed and championed the changes in laws and attitudes which have begun to exorcise the Old South from the new Atlanta. As the city has moved toward fuller participation in the national economy, old habits and prejudices have become increasingly cumbersome and irrelevant both to Atlanta's industry and to her image...
...late fifties, when the South was preparing to close down its schools in protest against the 1954 Supreme Court school desegregation decision, McGill's daily front-page columns were avidly read and misread by both Southern racists and Northern liberals. To the grasseaters of rural Georgia he was a "race-mixer" and worse; former governor Eugene Talmadge referred to him as "Rastus McGill." To the liberals he was the South's single beacon of rationality; they were apt to overlook his claim that "this was never a question of being for integration or against...
During the fifties, McGill was definitely a "law of the land" moderate: he stressed not the moral justness of the Supreme Court decision, but the necessity for accepting the Court's authority and eschewing any form of violence. "The exercise of authority may not always be palatable," he wrote in one column, "but it is accepted...
...past skirted a definite position on the race issue, McGill has consistently scored all forms of Southern extremism. Some of his most notable editorial writing, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1958, has been in angry pursuit of the Ku Klux Klan and other advocates of violence. "To the Kluxer mentality," he wrote in one anthologized column, "the Christian communion cup must be a Dixie...
...same time. McGill is keenly antagonistic to Southern "liberals" who have continued to compromise their integrity on the race issue. A favorite target is Senator William Fulbright, whom McGill calls "a pathetic sort of character with a great liberal reputation...