The Pulitzer Prizes are never a perfect measure of great journalism in a particular era, but they remain a good place to start. On matters of race, the Prizes stand way behind, say, Major League Baseball in crossing the color line. Jackie Robinson was well retired before Moneta Sleet became the first Black journalist to win a Pulitzer Prize as an individual for his 1968 iconic photo of Coretta King and her daughter at MLK’s funeral service.
With that failure on its historical record, the Pulitzers can lay claim to one significant contribution to social justice in America: For most of a century, when the members of the Pulitzer Board saw evidence of White journalists going courageously after the Ku Klux Klan and other racist organizations, they patted them on the back and gave them a prize.
On many occasions, that journalism was produced not just in bigger cities like Memphis or Atlanta, but in small towns such as Lexington, Mississippi and Tabor City, North Carolina.
To see a record of such prizes over a century — the Poynter Institute counted close to 100 in its research – is to be inspired by the moral and physical coverage required to speak truth – not just to authorized power – but to a violent society deluded on matters of race.
In his groundbreaking work The Mind of the South (1940), the Southern journalist and historian W.J Cash records how dangerous it was for anyone in the former Confederate States to advocate in public for racial justice. If simply speaking out for tolerance in a coffee shop or beauty salon could get you whipped, shot, or hung, imagine the guts it took for journalists to conduct editorial crusades against the KKK.
- In 1922, the Pulitzer for Public Service went to the New York World for an expose on the Klan. The investigative series ran for three weeks and was heavily promoted by the newspaper. During that three-week run, newspaper circulation rose by 100,000 copies daily. The series was syndicated in newspapers across the country. The paper’s star columnist Heywood Broun continued to attack the Klan and woke up one Sunday morning with a cross burning outside his Connecticut house.
- In 1923, The Public Service Medal would again go to a newspaper exposing the Klan, this time the Memphis Commercial Appeal. The paper reported stories exposing the hooded terrorists, but the journalistic weapon of choice turned out to be another Pulitzer staple, the editorial cartoon. The cartoonist was named J. P. Alley, and his biting page-one cartoons won him admirers – and physical threats from the Klan.
- In 1925, the Columbia (Ga.) Enquirer-Sun became the first small town newspaper to win a Pulitzer for Public Service for its reporting on lynchings and the Klan. The paper was owned by a remarkable couple, Julian and Julia Collier Harris. She wrote most of the stories. Because of boycotts, threats, and sabotage, the couple sold the paper in 1929. It took them 20 years to pay off their debts.
- In 1928, the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writers would go to Grover Cleveland Hall, editor of the Montgomery (Al.) Advertiser. By then the Klan included countless public officials, politicians, law enforcement officers and both United States senators from Alabama. Too often there was silence from the pulpit – and from the press.
The exception was Grover Hall. In July of 1927 Hall became outraged at the flogging of a young Black man at a rural church. He led his newspaper on a crusade designed to bring the Klansmen to justice. He exposed Klan members, worked to limit their activities, and supported a law to make it illegal to wear a mask in public. He wrote:
“Mask-wearing in public places is indefensible and must be outlawed. All good citizens, we believe, must now realize that the mask in Alabama is a source of unmitigated evil. It is a menace to life and limb and a reproach to civilized society. Concealed under hood and robe, men have stalked about in the night in Alabama and cruelly assaulted helpless people, and in other instances intimidated and wronged citizens of this State.”
After the Depression and World War II, America would soon be forced to see racial justice in a new way. American soldiers would go to war and see first-hand where oppression, intolerance and racial hatred would lead: the concentration camps.
One of those soldiers was Hodding Carter Jr. He returned home to start a newspaper in Greenville, Mississippi, which would become the Delta Democrat-Times. He wrote about racial injustice and the need for social change in the South, a stand that earned him and his family scorn and economic boycott.
Carter’s message found a national and international stage. He wrote passionately in Look magazine against the White Citizens’ Councils that had established themselves in the South as the heirs of the Ku Klux Klan. His principled stance earned him the enmity of the Mississippi State Legislature, which took a vote and condemned his article as a “lie by a nigger-loving editor.”
In a page-one editorial, Carter responded:
By a vote of 89 to 19, the Mississippi House of Representatives has resolved the editor of this newspaper into a liar because of an article I wrote. If this charge were true, it would make me well qualified to serve in that body. It is not true. So to even things up, I hereby resolve by vote of one to nothing that there are 89 liars in the state legislature. I am hopeful that this fever like Ku Kluxism that arose from the same kind of infection will run its course before too long a time. Meanwhile, those 89 character robbers can go to hell, collectively or singly, and wait there until I back down. They needn’t plan on returning.
When violent mobs appeared in Southern towns in the 1950s and 60s to spread terror in opposition to school desegregation, some White editorialists stood tall. In 1956 a mob threatened Autherine Lucy, who was trying to enter the University of Alabama. Buford Boone responded with editorials in the Tuscaloosa News:
Every person who witnessed the events there with comparative detachment speaks of the tragic nearness with which our great university came to being associated with murder — yes, we said murder….
As a result, Boone and his family were threatened. His phone would start ringing every 20 minutes, keeping the family awake in the middle of the night. His windows would be broken. If Boone was away, his wife would be called to tell her that her husband was in grave trouble.
In Little Rock, it would be Harry Ashmore who would step up to the plate. A famous 1957 photograph shows a young Elizabeth Eckford walking unprotected trying to enter Central High School. She is surrounded by a White mob yelling at her. Ashmore won his Pulitzer for writing:
Somehow, some time, every Arkansas is going to have to be counted. We are going to have to decide what kind of people we are – whether we obey the law only when we approve of it, or whether we obey it no matter how distasteful we may find it….
None of these men, in spite of their Pulitzers, would be recognized as progressive by modern standards. On a personal level, some objected to the forced integration of the races. But they abhorred violence and believed in the rule of law. One of the greatest of these voices was Ralph McGill, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, who would come to characterize his own early work on matters of race as “pale tea.”
But he realized that small gestures of courtesy and respect could mean a lot. In 1938 he became executive editor and insisted that the word Negro be spelled with a capital N, an unheard of practice in the South. Twenty years later, he returned home from a speaking tour to be informed by his wife that the Temple, Atlanta’s largest Jewish synagogue had been bombed. With passionate outrage, he drove to the office and banged out an editorial that would become famous and earn him a Pulitzer Prize.
Dynamite in great quantity Sunday ripped a beautiful temple of worship in Atlanta. It followed hard on the heels of a like destruction of a handsome high school at Clinton, Tennessee.
The same rabid, mad-dog minds were, without question, behind both. They also are the source of previous bombings in Florida, Alabama and South Carolina. The schoolhouse and the church are the targets of diseased, hate-filled minds.
Let us face the facts.
This is a harvest. It is the crop of things sown.
It is not possible to preach lawlessness and restrict it….
To be sure, none said go bomb a Jewish temple or a school
But let it be understood that when leadership in high places in any degree fails to support constituted authority, it opens the gates to all those who wish to take law into their hands…..
This, too, is a harvest of those so-called Christian ministers who have chosen to preach hate instead of compassion. Let them now find pious words and raise their hands in deploring the bombing of a synagogue.
You do not preach and encourage hatred for the Negro and hope to restrict it to that field. It is an old, old story. It is one repeated over and over again in history. When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, then no one is safe.
The list of White Southern editorialists writing for social justice in the 1960s goes on and on: Ira B. Harkey, Jr. writing for the Pascagoula (Miss.) Chronicle. Segregationists boycotted his newspaper. Someone fired a bullet through his door. He had to sell his paper and move out of state. But his words live on.
There was Hazel Brannon Smith winning a prize for editorials in the Lexington (Miss.) Advertiser. Here’s what she said upon receiving her Pulitzer:
All we have done here is to try to meet honestly the issues as they arose. We did not ask for, not run from this fight with the White Citizens’ Councils. But we have given it all we have, nearly 10 years of our lives, loss of financial security and a big mortgage. We would do the same thing over, if necessary….I could not call myself an editor if I had gone along with the Citizens’ Councils – feeling about them the way I do. My interest has been to print the truth and protect and defend the freedom of all Mississippians. It will continue.
I was fortunate enough to call one of these heroic editorialists a mentor. Gene Patterson, a colleague of Ralph McGill, wrote editorial columns for the Constitution, including one that hangs on the wall of the Poynter Institute, near the library that bears his name. On the morning of September 15, 1963, Gene was mowing the grass in his yard when he learned the news that four young girls had been murdered in Birmingham, Alabama, when a dynamite bomb went off in their church. On that day, he wrote his most famous column, tears streaming down his face. It bore the title: “A Flower for the Graves.”
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, 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….
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.
Such was the power of this righteous rhetoric coming from a White Southerner in 1963 that Walter Cronkite invited Patterson to read the column, in its entirety on the CBS Evening News.
Patterson, a decorated World War II veteran, would never accept credit for his courage. He recognized that journalists writing for the African-American newspapers of the day had a much more dangerous job. He would always say that the real heroes, the true warriors of justice, were the young Black men and women — he often mentioned John Lewis — who were willing to sacrifice their bodies during nonviolent protests, standing up against snarling dogs, billy clubs, and fire hoses.
If we could gather these brave journalists from the dead and reunite them in a city like Atlanta, I believe they would be amazed at the progress made in America on matters of race. If you showed them a video of the hate mongers marching in Charlottesville, they would be greatly disheartened. They would tell us not to be afraid, that they had seen this evil before. People of courage stood up to face it, at the risk of their own lives and livelihoods. It was done back then. It can be done again.
Editor’s note: This essay was written with the help of a resource guide on journalism and social justice compiled by historian and archivist David Shedden for the Poynter Institute and the Pulitzer Prize Centennial. Credit also goes to these books: “Pulitzer Prize Editorials,” by Wm. David Sloan and Laird B. Anderson; and “Pulitzer’s Gold,” by Roy J. Harris Jr.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly described the year a photograph was taken. It was 1957, not 1958.
