I grew up in Georgia reading The Atlanta Constitution, then named one of the world’s15 great newspapers. It was so because of a dedicated publisher, Ralph McGill, and editor, Gene Patterson, and reporters and photographers who had guts when it took guts to have guts. Later that paper would lure me from The Associated Press to write a column on its pages. “How’d you like to be a hero in your hometown?” asked then-editor Hal Gulliver in that joking way he had. Hal grew up with them too and carried on that great journalistic tradition. How often does anyone get to work with heroes and for an organization with that kind of legacy? Long before Hal’s phone call to me in Seattle, Patterson addressed an awful crime at a black church, this one in Birmingham, a town I also worked in for the AP. We’re talking about that again this week. As we think about the comparisons of Charleston and Birmingham and the 52 years in-between, it is worth noting what Patterson wrote after the Birmingham bombing then about responsibility, politicians and voters. It saddens me this still occurs and for the same demented reasons, but also that the era of journalism giants like Patterson who hold a mirror up to ourselves is probably gone forever. A link to the Patterson column is here.
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