("Knowing that you valued Ralph's freindship and treasure ...)
"Knowing that you valued Ralph's freindship and treasure his memory, we want you to have a copy of this privately printed book. It contains selected quotations from Ralph McGill's daily column which for more than thirty years appeared in the Atlanta Constitution, first on eh editorial page and later on page one in column one." ~ Mary Lynn McGill and Ralph McGill, Jr.
https://www.amazon.com/Ralph-Emerson-McGill-1898-1969/dp/B00211YX9U?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B00211YX9U
( A wide-ranging blend of autobiography and history, The ...)
A wide-ranging blend of autobiography and history, The South and the Southerner is one prominent newspaperman's statement on his region, its heritage, its future, and his own place within it. Ralph McGill (1898-1969), the longtime editor and later publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, was one of a handful of progressive voices heard in southern journalism during the civil rights era. From the podium of his front-page columns, he delivered stinging criticisms of ingrained southern bigotry and the forces marshaled against change; yet he retained throughout his career--and his writing--a deep affection for all southerners, even those who declared themselves his enemies. In The South and the Southerner, originally published in 1963, McGill moves freely from personal anecdotes about his Tennessee upbringing and Vanderbilt education to reflections on the decline of the plantation economy and his hopes for racial justice. Scattered throughout are vividly rendered biographical vignettes of the South's diverse sons and daughters--figures ranging from demagogues like Mississippi's James Vardaman to Lucy Randolph Mason, the Virginia-born clergyman's daughter who became a tireless crusader for organized labor. Poignant and eloquent, the book remains a compelling meditation on southern identity and culture.
https://www.amazon.com/South-Southerner-Ralph-Emerson-McGill/dp/0316558958?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0316558958
Ralph Emerson McGill was born on February 5, 1898 on a farm at Igou's Ferry, Tennessee. He was the son of Benjamin Franklin McGill and Mary Lou Skillern. The family moved to the coal town of Soddy, where his father took a miner's job, and then to Chattanooga, where he became a clerk. McGill's father's middle name had been changed, and the boy's name chosen, with a bow to literary culture, and the education of this only son was a key concern of the family.
McGill's health did not permit him to begin school until he was eight. He enrolled at Vanderbilt University in 1917, dropped out to enter the marines, and then returned for three years to study. In college he was interested in a circle of "fugitive" writers and in the football team, on which he played guard. McGill was expelled from Vanderbilt in 1922 for a prank played on a rival fraternity, and so he did not receive a degree. He wrote for the Nashville Banner while in school and became a full-time reporter soon after leaving the university.
McGill rose rapidly in journalism, for he wrote lucidly and quickly and was drawn to stories with broad appeal. A ruminative man, he found reporting to be a tonic. He made his mark in the profession through his coverage of Floyd Collins, who was trapped in a cave, one of the biggest newspaper stories of the 1920's. McGill's folksy "I'm the Gink" column was syndicated and his sports reporting was widely admired. Unlike many other reporters, he remained in, and loved, the South and had a brooding concern with racial issues. McGill was hired by the Atlanta Constitution in 1929 as an assistant sports editor. McGill was a leading editorial voice of the Constitution by the end of the decade, and in 1942 he became editor in chief, a position that made him a spokesman for the South. After the Civil War, Henry Grady, the publisher, had used this paper as a pulpit for his "New South" creed. Clark Howell followed with an editorial policy of moderation on racial issues and encouragement for modern industry and agriculture. McGill worked at Grady's roll top desk under Howell's protecting hand.
McGill is best known as an anti-segregationist editor and publisher of the Atlanta Constitution newspaper. McGill's courage brought him a shower of honors in the last fifteen years of his life. He became a fixture on foundation boards and State Department tours. He published Israel Revisited (1950), on his travels in that nation, and he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for an editorial on the bombing of an Atlanta synagogue.
( A wide-ranging blend of autobiography and history, The ...)
("Knowing that you valued Ralph's freindship and treasure ...)
McGill was an effervescent Democratic partisan. When he returned from the 1936 Democratic National Convention, he attempted to urinate on members of the Georgia delegation who made the mistake of ridiculing the New Deal in the bar car of their train. At the 1952 convention McGill jumped on his desk to cheer the nomination of Adlai E. Stevenson, bringing 220 pounds down on the hand of a fellow reporter.
In his daily column on the front page of the Constitution, McGill struck the expected notes of regional celebration. He had a fine ear for country dialogue, and he took readers with him across the rural South; hunting dogs, football teams, and agricultural agents often appeared in his column. In the face of Atlanta's growth and the lure of urban life, McGill's columns were daily assurance that the intoxicating landscape, plain talk, and rhythms of the King James Bible had survived. Slowly, but even more eloquently, McGill went beyond the New South creed and told Georgians that segregation and all forms of discrimination must cease. McGill recalled that he had not seen a black person before he was six years old and that in East Tennessee, with its small farms and Unionist heritage, the subjugation of blacks was not covered with glorious memories of the plantation and the lost cause. McGill welcomed blacks to his home in Atlanta, often repaying their social visits. Many Georgians in positions of authority heard McGill on their phone arguing for generosity or simple fairness for blacks. Before the 1950's, McGill spoke out against lynchings but opposed federal intervention in such cases. The Constitution also opposed fair-employment-practices legislation. McGill opposed Jim Crow regulations only when the separate facilities for blacks were not equal. He initially opposed integrated schools. After the Supreme Court ruled against segregated schools in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), McGill, in the face of broad resistance to the court order, argued that the law must be obeyed and that integration was a positive good.
McGill also defended the subsequent "freedom rides" and sit-ins against segregation in public facilities, and he supported court orders and the use of federal troops to open southern universities to blacks, as well as the marches and legal actions that gave blacks the power of the ballot. McGill was reviled and threatened for his crusading and some readers and advertising revenue were lost; he was protected by his friendship with Robert W. Woodruff, the president of the Coca-Cola Company. And the Cox newspaper organization had bought the Constitution in 1949, placing McGill in the employ of Governor James M. Cox of Ohio, an important liberal Democrat who did not follow the business logic of restraining McGill's challenge to racial mores. As in many news organizations, McGill's effort to mold public opinion in a period of controversy made for caution in other aspects of journalism. The Constitution made little effort to cover the civil rights revolution in its own backyard.
McGill's defense of the American role in Vietnam was also loud and confident. Patriotism, anti-Communism, and national service seemed all the more important to cling to because they had also been challenged.
member of the Peabody Awards Board of Jurors
McGill was loved for the enemies he had made and for the sympathies he shared with the broad coalition in favor of civil rights. All his life, for example, McGill had reported on developing countries.
McGill did not believe himself to be, as some of his enemies and admirers said, a southern man with northern principles. The North was not his model. He claimed to know nothing more than what every southerner could see: blacks haunted whites in a segregated society, and integration freed whites as much as blacks. McGill closely followed historians, such as C. Vann Woodward, who argued that there had always been flexibility in southern racial mores. Thus, McGill's journalism was more closely keyed to southern notions of guilt and tradition than to northern ideas of justice.
On September 4, 1929 McGill married Mary Elizabeth Leonard in Atlanta; they had three children. His first wife died in 1962; he married Mary Lynn Morgan, a dentist, on April 20, 1967.
15 June 1867 - 8 August 1940
3 December 1877 - 15 August 1966
6 January 1936 - 10 January 1936
3 February 1935 - 20 December 1939
