News-Record.com

I enjoyed reading a review in yesterday's New York Times Book Review of "The Race Beat, The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation."

No brief review can do justice to the varied cast of characters that populated the race beat during the 1950s and '60s. But readers should pay particular attention to...Claude Sitton, the Georgia-born journalist who served as The New York Times's chief Southern correspondent from 1958 to 1964. With considerable justification, the authors characterize Sitton as one of the unsung heroes of the Civil Rights movement. "Nobody in the news business," they insist, "would have as much impact as he would -- on the reporting of the civil rights movement, on the federal government's response or on the movement itself."

Claude was editor of the News & Observer when I was a reporter there in the 1980's. He was a formidable presence, as anti-authoritarian and anti-establishment as they come. He took guff from no one and seemed to define his power by working outside the traditional power structure, rather than from the inside where many editors of that time lived.

He was a tough boss. He once tore out a story I wrote and used a red grease pencil to write the questions I left unanswered. It was covered in red. But he encouraged us all to investigate the areas we covered to make sure that power was operating fairly and responsibly.

I'm writing this as if he's dead. Hardly. He's 81 and living in Georgia. The book is on my list.