William Emerson Jr. | Civil rights reporter, 86
William A. Emerson Jr., 86, a journalist and author who covered civil rights flash points as one of a cadre of gutsy Southern reporters and later served as editor in chief of the Saturday Evening Post, died Tuesday.
William A. Emerson Jr., 86, a journalist and author who covered civil rights flash points as one of a cadre of gutsy Southern reporters and later served as editor in chief of the Saturday Evening Post, died Tuesday.
Mr. Emerson, whose health had declined after a stroke, died at home in Atlanta.
A boisterous, outsize figure in an era of colorful New York magazine editors, Mr. Emerson stood 6-foot-3 and his booming voice took over any room. His gifts as a phrasemaker made him a sought-after speaker.
A veteran of the China-Burma-India theater in World War II, Mr. Emerson took up journalism at Collier's magazine in New York after graduating from Harvard in 1948.
He was appointed Newsweek's first bureau chief covering the South in 1953, one year before the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which ordered an end to public school segregation and triggered years of resistance and violence across his native region.
Mr. Emerson wrote about Klan cross burnings in the woods of Florida and school integration fights from Nashville to New Orleans. In Montgomery, Ala., he covered the historic bus boycott and the emergence of its leader, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
He was the author or coauthor of a number of books, including a colorful layman's biography titled The Jesus Story and Sin and the New American Conscience. - AP