Death of a Conscience

The enlightened Southern editor waging his fearless and lonely fight against prejudice has become a journalistic stereotype. Yet the death last week of the Atlanta Constitution's Ralph McGill, two days before his 71st birthday, was a painful reminder of just how rare such men are. For four decades his daily column caressed the South with his love, lashed it for its faults, served as its conscience. Surveys repeatedly rated him as both the region's best-liked and least-liked writer--but always the most read. Even his haters could not ignore him, because, as one of his admiring colleagues put it: "Mac had guts when it took guts to have guts."

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 plan is, in fact, neither real freedom nor a choice," McGill wrote. "It is discrimination."

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, then no one is safe." Yet McGill could also write warmly of "the acrid, nostalgic smell of wood burning beneath the weekly washday pots; the pine-and-oak smoke from chimneys of farmhouses fighting with the smell of wet-plowed earth."

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 him. In the '30s and '40s McGill and Georgia's demagogic then-Governor Eugene Talmadge engaged in repeated public disputes, but Talmadge seriously asked McGill to write his biography--and McGill never could convince him of the suggestion's absurdity.

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 Nuernberg 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 as its publisher since 1960, McGill proved too kindly to crack the editorial whip that the slipping newspaper needed. It is a measure of the man that the paper enjoyed a reputation far exceeding its merit only because Ralph McGill was there.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.