Bill Minor; opened eyes to racial bias in South . By Sam Roberts New
York Times . NEW YORK - Bill Minor, whose courageous reporting helped
reveal to Americans everyday racial discrimination in the South in the
1960s and won him recognition as the "conscience of Mississippi," died
Tuesday in Ridgeland, Miss., outside Jackson. He was 94. His death, at
a hospice, was confirmed by his son Paul. Mr. Minor was already a
fiercely independent and fearless muckraker, exposing corrupt
Mississippi politicians in The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, when his
news articles and commentary emerged as the region's lonely but
conspicuous witness to the fledgling civil rights movement and the
brutal efforts by some Southern politicians to suppress it. His voice
not only traveled from the newspaper's bureau at the state capitol in
Jackson to neighboring Louisiana but also reverberated nationwide.
While serving as The Times-Picayune's capital correspondent, Minor was
also a stringer, or part-time reporter, for The New York Times and
Newsweek magazine. "No Southern newspaperman has done more for civil
rights and civil liberties than Bill Minor," Claude Sitton, another son
of the South who covered the movement for The Times, once said.
Historians have credited Sitton, who died in 2015, and another Times
colleague, John Herbers, who died this month, with playing major roles
in reporting the civil rights struggle. Gene Roberts, who succeeded
Sitton and was The Times' chief correspondent in the South, said in a
phone interview Tuesday: "It would be hard to overestimate Bill's
importance to journalism and to keeping the country abreast of what was
going on in Mississippi. When you had to barrel quickly into
Mississippi, your first stop would be Bill Minor. Ellen Ann Fentress,
who recently completed a documentary film about Mr. Minor titled - like
his weekly column - "Eyes on Mississippi," called him "the most
essential reporter the nation has never heard of. Mr. Minor's first
assignment in Jackson was the funeral of Theodore G. Bilbo, a US
senator from Mississippi and an unabashed white supremacist who died in
1947. As Mr. Minor later recalled, he thought at the time that
segregation might be buried with Bilbo. As it endured, Mr. Minor
covered every benchmark along the way: the revolt of the Dixiecrats in
the 1948 presidential election; the 1955 murder trial of two white men
in the death of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy who was said to
have whistled at a white woman; James Meredith's enrollment as the
first black student at the University of Mississippi in 1962; the
Woolworth's lunch counter sit-in and the murder of Medgar Evers in
1963; and the murder of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County,
Miss., in 1964. "Even before there was a movement in civil rights,
Minor exposed wide racial disparities in the allocation of state funds
for schools; in doing so, of course, he debunked the myth of 'separate
but equal' schools," said Hank Klibanoff, who wrote "The Race Beat: The
Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation" (2006)
with Roberts. Hodding Carter III, a fellow Mississippi journalist and
later an assistant secretary of state, said in a phone interview that
Mr. Minor's understanding of the perniciousness of legal segregation
had evolved. "But," Carter added, "his evolution, in the face of the
society he was covering, looked like a revolution. Wilson Floyd Minor
was born in Hammond, La., which Carter, whose father was also born
there, said "was not a place that taught you to give a damn about black
folks. His mother was the former Josie Clement. His father, Jacob, was
a newspaper Linotype operator who struggled during the Depression and
urged his son to shun journalism. But Bill was hooked early when an
English teacher at Bogalusa High School praised his writing. He landed
a summer job with The Bogalusa Enterprise, began covering high school
sports for The Times-Picayune and graduated from Tulane University in
1943 with a degree in journalism. In addition to his son Paul, he
leaves his wife, the former Gloria Marks; two other sons, Doug and Dr.
Jeffrey Minor; six grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. Mr.
Minor joined The Times-Picayune after serving in the Navy as a gunnery
officer on a destroyer in the Pacific during World War II. He worked at
the paper for nearly 30 years, until it shut its Jackson bureau in
1976. Afterward he bought what became the weekly Capitol Reporter in
Jackson and edited it until it closed in 1981. (The paper had lost bank
advertising after he revealed that the police had found several pounds
of marijuana at the bank president's home.) He later wrote a weekly
syndicated column and a book, "Eyes on Mississippi: A Fifty-Year
Chronicle of Change" (2001). The late author David Halberstam, who
began his journalistic career in Mississippi, described Mr. Minor as
"the unique conscience of the state. Colleagues attributed his
deep-seated empathy to his family's struggles during the Depression and
to his convictions as a Roman Catholic. (In 1963, after he saw black
protesters being savagely beaten in Jackson, he retreated to St.
Peter's Cathedral to pray for reason and calm.) "Somewhere along the
way, I developed this feeling for the underdog because I was part of
that underdog world," Mr. Minor told students at a predominantly black
high school in 1997. "I knew what it was like to be on the bottom. Mr.
Minor's wife wanted to leave the state years ago, but he remained, he
told Klibanoff, because "I saw there was hope there, that Mississippi
would change. "There was always this warmth and gentleness on the part
of the people of Mississippi," he continued, as quoted by Klibanoff,
"and their greatest handicap has always been politicians who provided
no leadership and who thrived on the emotional issue of segregation.
And the more I saw of those kind of people, you know, pushed in the
background, the more hope I had for the state. "So I wanted to stay. I
wanted to see how it was all going to come out.
