Civil Rights Advocate Dies

Eugene Patterson, voice on civil rights, dies at 89

Published January 13, 2013

Associated Press

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  Eugene Patterson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editor and columnist whose impassioned words helped draw national attention to the civil rights movement as it unfolded across the South, has died at 89.

  
  

  Patterson, who helped fellow whites to understand the problems of racial discrimination, died Saturday evening in Florida after complications from prostate cancer, according to B.J. Phillips, a family spokeswoman

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  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 a shoe, one shoe, from the foot of her dead child. We hold that shoe with her.

  
  
  Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/01/13/eugene-patterson-voice-on-civil-rights-dies-at-8/#ixzz2HtGMphZl
  

  
  

  
  

Source: AP and (AP Photo/The Tampa Bay Times, Cherie Diez) TAMPA OUT; CITRUS COUNTY OUT; PORT CHARLOTTE OUT; BROOKSVILLE HERNANDO TODAY OUT (Tampa Bay Times2012)