Title of Paper: TRANSCENDING THE ‘EDITORIAL THUN- DER’: ATLANTA’S NEWSPAPER COVERAGE OF THE 1960 STUDENT SIT-INS

Name: Carl V. Lewis

B.A., Southern Studies, Mercer University, 2011.

Directed by

Doug Thompson, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Mercer University.

Perhaps the single most important news event to take place in the Atlanta civil rights movement was the student sit-in campaign launched on downtown department store lunch- counters in the fall of 1960. This essay will analyze coverage of the 1960 sit-ins in Atlanta’s two most widely-read broadsheets, the white-owned Constitution and the black-owned Daily World. In doing so, it will seek to demonstrate that the Constitution’s significant failures in reporting the movement have often been overshadowed within historical and popular memory by the progressive legacy of its two most prominent integrationist editors, Ralph McGill and Gene Patterson.

Transcending the “Editorial Thunder”:

Atlanta’s Newspaper Coverage of the 1960 Student Sit-Ins

Introduction and Scope

On the morning of February 26, 1979, a crowd of nearly 350 guests packed into the Uni- versity of Georgia Chapel in Athens to attend the first annual “McGill Lecture” in honor of famed civil rights-era editor Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution. Presiding over the inaugu- ral lecture was McGill’s closest friend and editorial successor, Gene Patterson, who in the years leading up to McGill’s death in 1969 had carried on the torch of McGill’s integrationist crusades on an almost daily basis in the pages of the Constitution. “Ralph McGill’s legacy was the exam- ple he set for the rest of us in journalism,” Patterson remarked to the audience. “Perhaps never again in American life will one editor be thrust forward by destiny to take up so monumental an issue, so clearly-defined, and, starting nearly alone, to fight it to overwhelming victory.” As Patterson’s remarks serve to emphasize, McGill’s status as a civil rights hero had already become enshrined within cultural memory only a decade after his death, much in the same way Patter- son’s own legacy eventually would. This process of memorialization has led New York Times edi- tor Howell Raines to hail both McGill and Patterson in 2001 “as the South’s two most heroic voices on civil rights and race,” concluding that each man was to a great degree responsible for fashioning Atlanta’s image as “the city too busy to hate.”2

Abstract

Transcending the “Editorial Thunder”: Atlanta’s Newspaper Coverage of the 1960 Student Sit-Ins

Transcending the “Editorial Thunder”:
Atlanta’s Newspaper Coverage of the 1960 Student Sit-Ins