"I'm not a blind boy from Alabama," said Roy Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, a journalism think-tank. "I'm a white man from Long Island."
That didn't stop him from slipping into his best BB King imitation, grabbing a pole microphone by the hand and serenading legendary journalist Eugene Patterson, the special guest at a Sanford Institute of Public Policy panel Tuesday, in an a capella rendition of the spiritual "Walkin' Down Freedom Road."
"I feel inspired by the music in Gene Patterson's writing," said Clark, who co-edited The Changing South of Gene Patterson: Journalism of Civil Rights, 1960-1968, with a second panelist, Raymond Arsenault, John Hope Franklin professor of history at the University of South Florida.
Patterson, editor-in-chief of The Atlanta Constitution from 1960 to 1968, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights columnist and one of the most famous and prolific Southern journalists. During his tenure, he was responsible for some of the most passionately written and controversial editorials on racial equality in the nation.
"We didn't settle this by the sword in the 20th century. We settled it by the pen," Patterson told a packed audience. "[The United States] was a vicious society we were trying to change."
While Patterson--a former Duke Trustee and former editor, president and CEO of The St. Petersburg Times--answered questions and gave a short speech, both Arsenault and Clark read two examples of his writings, which they also distributed to the audience.
"To read Gene's columns is to see the 1960s though his eyes--an extraordinary revolution," Arsenault said. He chose to read one of Patterson's celebrated editorials, "I Have a Dream," written the day after Martin Luther King, Jr.'s monumental speech in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 30, 1963. "Gene Patterson saw this writing for the most influential paper in the South," Arsenault said.
Arsenault cited Patterson's finesse in capturing the essence and importance of King's speech with only one draft. "He urged us to follow the '60s with him. It was a dizzying experience to deal with this much change in this short amount of time."
Clark read Patterson's much-lauded essay, "A Flower for the Graves," written Sept. 16, 1963, in response to the murders of four black girls in Birmingham, Ala., at the hands of white residents. The article, in which Patterson blamed the crime on all Southerners--black and white--was considered so powerful that former anchorman Walter Cronkite asked him to read it on the CBS Evening News.
Citing the extensive use of the pronoun 'we' in the article, Clark said, "This was not a man talking down from the mountain top but having a spirited, spiritual conversation with his fellow Southerners about the possibility of change."
Patterson himself spoke about the challenges he faced as a liberal-minded figure in a segregated Southern society. Growing up in a segregated community and attending segregated schools, he spoke Tuesday of several instances where he was confronted with the harsh nature of racial inequality.
"[Race] is the great domestic issue for this country," he said. "It's not just about race or laws-it's about the human heart."
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