William Emerson Jr., 86, chronicled the civil rights era

By Rick Badie

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Journalists who covered the civil rights movement often laid their lives on the line just like the participants.

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Family photo William "Bill" Emerson Jr. offers a toast at a family birthday party in the 1980s.

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Southern reporters, in particular, had to look within, do some soul searching. They had to write about the cultural change unfolding in their backyards. Change that pit neighbor against neighbor. The South against the nation.

William Emerson Jr., Newsweek’s Atlanta bureau chief, was one of the best. He and his staff traveled the region to witness and chronicle the historic movement.

“He always talked about the evolution of his awareness and consciousness,” son William A. “Bo” Emerson III of Atlanta said, “and the dilemma of the South at that time.”

In prose, Mr. Emerson captured the drama of bomb blasts, Klan cross burnings and school integration skirmishes. He covered the Montgomery bus boycott and interviewed stalwarts like Rosa Parks and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Decades later, his articles still pack the power to bring those dramas to life, to put readers in the midst of flash points, said Hank Klibanoff, former managing editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and co-author of “The Race Beat: The Press, The Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation.”

Mr. Emerson’s dispatches during the civil rights era are archived at Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library. Mr. Klibanoff read those manuscripts as research for his Putlitzer Prize-winning book.

“They immersed me in the drama of the times,” he said. “He was a spectacular writer who managed to plow all of his energy and spirit into his stories.”

William Austin “Bill” Emerson Jr., 86, of Atlanta died Tuesday of natural causes at his home. The funeral will be 2 p.m. Saturday at First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta. H.M. Patterson & Son, Spring Hill, is in charge of arrangements.

Mr. Emerson spent time in Charlotte and Raleigh before he moved to Atlanta as a teen. He attended Boys High and North Fulton High, followed by two years of college before enlistment in the Army.

After service, the World War II veteran graduated from Harvard University. In 1953, he was tapped as Newsweek’s first bureau chief in the South. He later held posts for Newsweek in New York and at The Saturday Evening Post, where he rose to editor in chief before the publication folded in February 1969.

Subsequent years were spent writing books, notably “The Jesus Story” and “To Rule the Night,” co-written with James B. Irwin. He also taught journalism at the University of South Carolina.

Claude Fox Sitton, a resident of Oxford, covered the civil rights movement for The New York Times. Emerson, he noted, was one of the best. He also praised another skill.

“Bill was a marvelous raconteur, Southern style,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Friends and former students from the University of South Carolina would travel across the South to hear another uproarious account of life as witnessed by a master of that art.”

When columnist Celestine Sibley died in 1999, Mr. Emerson penned a tribute for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Her passing, he noted, did not leave admirers empty-handed. She’d left behind a sizable body of journalistic work.

The same can be said for Mr. Emerson.

Other survivors include three daughters, Laura Emerson Alexander of Chapel Hill, N.C.; Lucy Emerson Sullivan of Newtown, Conn.; and Ellen Emerson Yaghjian of Columbia; another son, John F. Emerson of Columbia; a brother, Boynton Emerson of Towson, Md., 10 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.