Monday-Thursday: study / writing time. Your midterm is Friday in class. Your newspaper article is due at that time. Make sure you include a photo. While you may use one from the internet, an original is preferable. I'll double check today on your specific topic. (see last Friday, if you need an idea.)
What follows are excerpts from yesterday's obituary on Eugene Patterson. Why am I asking you to read this? Through his column, Mr. Patterson effected major social change. What follows is the column he wrote after the bombing that killed four girls in Birmingham, Alabama. Please take the time to read his powerful words.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eugene Patterson dies in Florida
Editor of Atlanta Constitution in the 60s covered the civil rights movement when many southern newspapers wouldn't.
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's September 16, 1963, column about the Birmingham, Alabama, 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.
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 south-western 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.
Gene Patterson’s most famous column: ‘A Flower for the Graves’
This column by Eugene Patterson, then editor of the Atlanta
Constitution, was originally published in that paper on September 16, 1963 and
read aloud that evening by Walter Cronkite on the “CBS Evening News.” Patterson
died Jan. 12, 2013 at the age of 89.
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.
A grieving relative of
one of bombing victims in Birmingham, Ala., Sept. 15, 1963 at the Sixteenth
Street Baptist Church is led away after telling officers that some of his
family was in the section most heavily damaged. Man just in back of him is
holding a shoe found in the debris. At least four persons were known to have
been killed. (AP Photo)
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.
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