Within minutes of the announcement that Cynthia Tucker was leaving to teach at the University of Georgia, the Twitter reactions started coming.
“Darn graduation! Would have loved to take this @UGAGrady class,” one message read.
“I would kill to be in her class,” another college-age student wrote.
I understand the sentiment. For the past 20 years, I’ve had the pleasure to work with Tucker, observing first hand as a journalist of integrity, passion and talent plied her craft. I’ve witnessed grace under pressure, as well as a stubborn insistence on always telling the truth as she saw it.
Admittedly, the truth as Tucker saw it has not always been popular. In many cases, that has been the result of honest, legitimate differences of opinion. But at times it has been something else.
Former Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell, for example, grew so frustrated with Tucker’s hard-hitting columns accusing him of corruption that he concocted an odd explanation. He privately spread the rumor that Tucker was going after him because — get this — he had spurned her romantic advances.
I laughed out loud the first time I heard that one, and it makes me chuckle even now. But from Campbell’s perspective, even a ridiculous tale like that was better than admitting that Tucker was right. To borrow Tucker’s words, “he ran the most corrupt City Hall in modern Atlanta history,” a verdict that time and a federal jury later validated.
Between 2004 and 2007, Tucker was a finalist three times for the Pulitzer Prize in commentary, winning the highest honor in journalism in 2007. The judges took note of what they called Tucker’s “courageous, clear-headed columns that evince a strong sense of morality and persuasive knowledge of the community.”
However, if her work impressed people nationally, it was even more impressive for those who know Atlanta, Georgia and the South more intimately.
Growing up in Monroeville, Ala., the setting of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Tucker has personal memories of segregation and of the difficult transitions of the civil rights era. So it was natural for her to venerate both Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph McGill, the legendary editor of the Atlanta Constitution who was one of the rare white Southern editors to champion an end to Jim Crow.
As a successor to McGill, Tucker worked hard to honor his legacy, to the point of digging McGill’s desk out of AJC storage and installing it in her office. She also took great offense that those charged with protecting King’s legacy were not equally diligent, instead using his fame to put cash into “the greedy, grasping hands of King’s [adult] children.”
“Leave it to MLK’s family to accomplish what his archenemy, J. Edgar Hoover, could not: tarnish King’s image,” she wrote.
Those are not charges that you level lightly, not against the King family, not in this town. But it was the truth, so Tucker wrote it and accepted the consequences.
Black readers have complained that she was too harsh on members of her own race, believing that a black woman as the leading voice of a major Southern newspaper should laud, not criticize. But Tucker’s first loyalty has always been to journalism, believing that public life was better served by holding everyone to one high standard.
Knowing Cynthia, I’m sure that she’ll work hard to instill that principle in her UGA students. A lot is changing in this business, but that standard never should.
And of course, Tucker was equally blunt on matters of race and discrimination. At times, that honesty has drawn vitriol from critics that was wildly out of proportion to the words that inspired it, but I’ve never seen that anger her. Whatever the price for telling the truth, she has been willing to pay it. And in this business, that’s better than a Pulitzer.
Jay Bookman is an Opinion columnist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
