NOTEWORTHY DEATH

Pulitzer winner, columnist Patterson

Eugene Patterson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editor and columnist whose words helped draw national attention to the civil-rights movement, died Saturday evening in Florida at age 89 after complications from prostate cancer, a family spokesman said.

Patterson was editor of the Atlanta Constitution from 1960 to 1968, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for editorial writing.

His famous column of Sept., 16, 1963, about the Birmingham, Ala., church bombing that killed four girls - “A Flower for the Graves” - was considered so moving that he was asked by Walter Cronkite to read it nationally on the CBS Evening News.

“A Negro mother wept in the street Sunday morning in front of a Baptist Church in Birmingham,” Patterson began his column. “In her hand she held ashoe, one shoe, from the foot of her dead child. We hold that shoe with her.

“Every one of us in the white South holds that small shoe in his hand. ... We who go on electing politicians who heat the kettles of hate. ... [The bomber] feels right now that he has been a hero. He is only guilty of murder. He thinks he has pleased us. We of the white South who knowbetter are the ones who must take a harsher judgment.”

“It was the high point of my life,” Patterson later said in a June 2006 interview from his home in St. Petersburg. “It was the only time I was absolutely sure I was right. They were not telling the truth to people and we tried to change that.”

In 1968, Patterson joined The Washington Post and served for three years as its managing editor, playing a central role in the publication of the Pentagon Papers.

After leaving the Post he spent a year teaching at Duke University.

He became editor of The St. Petersburg Times and its Washington publication, Congressional Quarterly, in 1972 and was later chief executive officer of The St. Petersburg Times Co. Under Patterson’s leadership, the Times won two Pulitzer Prizes.

Times owner Nelson Poynter, who died in 1978, chose Patterson to ensure his controlling stock in the newspaper company was used to fund a school for journalists then called the Modern Media Institute. It is now known as the Poynter Institute, which owns the Tampa Bay Times (formerly The St. Petersburg Times).

Patterson retired from the Times and Poynter in 1988.

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 8 on 01/14/2013

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