The Changing South of Gene Patterson: Journalism and Civil Rights, 1960-1968.

Edited by Roy Peter Clark and Raymond Arsenault. Foreword by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller. Southern Dissent. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida. c. 2002. Pp. [xviii], 305, $24.95, ISBN 0-8130-2574-5.)

Eugene C. Patterson was editor of the Atlanta Constitution from 1960 until 1968. During this period of political and social upheaval, he wrote a daily column for one of the nation's most important newspapers. Patterson's tenure coincided with the height of the civil rights movement, and the bulk of this collection of 122 columns deals with that struggle. Patterson's job, notes co-editor Roy Peter Clark, was "to converse each day with his white southern kinfolk and persuade them to climb aboard the train of racial change in America--or get out of the way. And to assure them that the sky would not fall if they did change" (p. 4). It was a job for which Patterson was ideally equipped, as a reading of his columns shows. He wrote as a southerner but with a perspective broadened by service in World War II and stints with United Press International wire service in New York City and London. "He could not be bullied or bought and he wrote like an angel," said Harold Martin of Patterson in his biography of Constitution publisher Ralph McGill, Patterson's mentor (quoted on p. 7).

Patterson also wrote as a white liberal, notes co-editor Raymond Arsenault, "which means he frequently found himself at odds with friends and neighbors and sometimes even with himself" (p. 17). Arsenault contends that, while each generation from the 1920s "produced a handful" of southern liberal editors (p. 18), McGill was "the boldest on matters of race" (p. 40). Patterson followed McGill's lead with columns that "prompted reflection and reconsideration, puzzlement, and even wonder" (p. 41).

Patterson's columns reflect the tenor of his time and place. He wrote with amazement about the school principal forced to resign because he chastised students and their parents for cheering John F. Kennedy's death. He told of a fellow war veteran, now a marshal protecting James Meredith in Mississippi, being wounded by a shotgun blast from a white mob. "It was worse than anything we saw in the war," said the veteran (p. 116). Patterson recalled being glad to get out of Alabama after having to eat in Tuskegee's Lakeview Dining Club, its membership card "good for one day only"--a ruse for limiting service to whites (p. 194).

Patterson chided his readers, scolded them, congratulated them, and tried to help them get past their prejudices. He reminded them that he was one of them, writing about tobacco crops, his boyhood on a farm, and trips back to fish with his friend Jack Wingate. Both Patterson and McGill were from small towns, and "one of their tricks ... was to constantly remind their readers that they were southerners," says present-day Constitution editorial page editor Cynthia Tucker in a closing interview (p. 284).

Journalist Clark and historian Arsenault chose material from 3,200 Patterson columns, presenting an effective blend of people stories with a point, most dealing with a southern newspaper's treatment of the South's most overriding social issue during the mid-twentieth century. Their presentation is well organized. Introductory chapters by the editors provide valuable background, establishing the context for Patterson's work. His columns ate presented chronologically by year, preceded by a list of each year's key events. Highly readable, this book is a solid addition to literature in the field.

WILLIAM A. NUNNELLEY

Samford University