Eugene Patterson, an editorial voice of conscience in the South during the Civil Rights era, died yesterday. Patterson was the editor of the Atlanta Constitution from 1960-1968 and wrote powerful columns condemning the violence and miscarriages of justice against blacks.
At the ruins of the 16th Street Baptist where a bomb killed four young girls in 1963, Patterson wrote his most most famous column, “A Flower for the Graves.” Walter Cronkite was so moved that he asked the editor to read it on the “CBS Evening News.” The column began: “A Negro mother wept in the street Sunday morning in front of a
Baptist Church in Birmingham. In her hand she held a shoe, one shoe,
from the foot of her dead child. We hold that shoe with her. Every one
of us in the white South holds that small shoe in his hand.
Patterson later served as managing editor of the Washington Post and as editor of the St. Petersburg Times. A collection of his columns for The Constitution was published as a
book, “The Changing South of Gene Patterson: Journalism and Civil
Rights, 1960-1968.”