RALPH EMERSON McGILL
Oil, 1984, 40 x 30 inches
Ralph Emerson
McGill, newspaperman, was born in Tennessee in 1898 and studied
at Vanderbilt University between 1917 and 1922, with time out
for service in the Marines during 1918 and 1919. Upon graduation,
he joined the staff of the Banner in Nashville where he
worked for a half-dozen years before he moved to Atlanta and its
Constitution. He spent the next decade as its sports editor,
before becoming executive editor for another four years. He was
the editor from 1942 to 1960. In those years, he had become an
outspoken critic of bigotry and segregation. For the decade of
the 1960s, he was the publisher of the Constitution, and
his writings led to his being called the "Conscience of the
South." In these years many honors came to him, including
the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing, the Presidential Medal
of Freedom in 1964, and honorary degrees from about twenty colleges
including Harvard, 1961; Morehouse, 1962; Notre Dame, 1963; Brown,
1964; and Atlanta and Tufts, 1965. He was a trustee of the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace. His adopted city of Atlanta
honored him by changing the name of a street to Ralph McGill Boulevard,
after it had carried for decades the name of the first imperial
Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. His books include The South and
the Southerner and No Place to Hide: The South and Human
Rights. His writing had chronicled the South's "Second
Reconstruction."
