Cynthia Tucker once wrote that the Deep South calls to her “as surely as sweet honeysuckle calls to hummingbirds.” She’s said she’s as Southern as funeral-home fans, as collard greens and magnolias. An Alabama native, Cynthia is the daughter of a middle school principal and a high school English teacher.
So it’s no surprise that she’s returning to Georgia to help educate a new generation of sons and daughters of the South.
Cynthia will join the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication as a visiting professor in a partnership arrangement with the AJC.
Cynthia’s career at this newspaper prepared her for that role. She started as a reporter for The Atlanta Journal right out of college in 1976, later joining the editorial page of The Constitution. In 1992, she was named editorial page editor of The Constitution and in 2001 filled that role for the combined Journal and Constitution newspapers. Since 2009, she has been based in Washington, writing commentary on the intersection of Georgia interests and national policy.
As a columnist, Cynthia has taken forceful and sometimes unpopular positions. Whether opposing the war in Iraq or criticizing the children of Martin Luther King Jr. for seeking to profit off their father’s good works, Cynthia challenged readers and made them think. In 2007 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, journalism’s highest honor, for commentary the judges described as courageous.
In a 1994 column on her Southern roots, Cynthia acknowledged the dichotomy that has defined much of her work. In loving the South, she had to be able to face its shortcomings in order to challenge the region to achieve its best. “My love is neither irrational nor uncritical,” she wrote. “I know the region in all its complexities — its bigotry and blindness, its passion and its spirituality, its richness and its many colors, of soil, of plants, of people.”
Now, Cynthia goes to Athens. We wish her all the best and look forward to seeing the results as she passes down her courage and passion. She’ll encourage her students to tell the South’s stories as vividly as she has, helping the next generation of journalists to recognize the region’s richness and diversity and reflect its challenges and promise.
Kevin Riley is editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
