RALEIGH, N.C. — Claude Sitton, a forceful editor who led The News & Observer from 1968 to 1990, won the Pulitzer Prize as a columnist for the paper, and as a fearless reporter for The New York Times set the standard for national coverage of the civil rights movement, died Tuesday in Atlanta. He was 89.
His years as Raleigh editor were marked by his aggressive direction of reporting and his determination to hold accountable those he thought were not acting in the public good.
Sitton was regarded as one of the best newsmen in American history for his work as a Times’ Southern correspondent from 1958 to 1964. He crisscrossed the region, often risking his life to cover nearly every major civil rights story in those years, writing about the lunch counter sit-ins that began in North Carolina, the riot as the University of Mississippi was desegregated, the assassination of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, the church bombing that killed four schoolgirls in Birmingham, Alabama, and the murder of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
Sitton’s direct, evocative and sometimes harrowing stories were a pipeline of truth from the front lines of the civil rights movement to the kitchen tables and living rooms of the rest of the nation.
“Third-string television reporters would have higher name recognition than this Timesman, but nobody in the news business would have as much impact as he would — on the reporting of the civil rights movement, on the federal government’s response, or on the movement itself,” wrote Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff in “The Race Beat,” their Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the role that journalism played in the civil rights movement. “Sitton’s byline would be atop the stories that landed on the desks of three presidents. His phone number would be carried protectively in the wallets of civil rights workers who saw him, and the power of his byline, as their best hope for survival.”
That is, if he survived himself. One hot summer night in 1962, Sitton was in a church in Sasser, Georgia, where, he had heard a group of white thugs might try to break up a black voter registration drive. A group of 13 white people, some of them local law officers, burst in.
Sitton started his story like this:
“‘We want our colored people to go on living like they have for the last hundred years,’ said Sheriff Z.T. Mathews of Terrell County. Then he turned and glanced disapprovingly at the thirty-eight Negroes and two whites gathered in the Mount Olive Baptist Church here last night for a voter-registration rally.
“‘I tell you, Cap’n, we’re a little fed up with this registration business,’ he went on.
“As the 70-year-old peace officer spoke, his nephew and chief deputy, M.E. Mathews, swaggered back and forth fingering a hand-tooled black leather cartridge belt and a .38-caliber revolver. Another deputy, R.M. Dunaway, slapped a five-cell flashlight against his left palm again and again.
“The three officers took turns badgering the participants and warning of what ‘disturbed white citizens’ might do if this and other rallies continued.”
When Sitton and two other reporters tried to leave, they found that someone had let the air out of their car tires and dumped sand in the gas tank.
The story found an attentive audience that included President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Within days, a swarm of FBI agents and Justice Department lawyers descended on the county and the Justice Department quickly filed a voting rights complaint against the sheriff.
Less than a month later, four black churches in the county were burned to the ground, including Mount Olive Baptist. About that time, Sitton got a call from a 22-year-old civil rights worker named Ralph Allen. He was in Terrell County lying on the floor of a house that was under fire from a mob outside. Another worker had been wounded.
Allen hadn’t called local law officers, who were just as likely to be Klan members as not. Sitton, he figured, was his best bet for help.
Sitton hung up, then called Sheriff Mathews and said he was coming back. Left unspoken was something they both knew: If any civil rights workers were killed, it would be in The New York Times as quickly as Sitton could put it there.
Claude Fox Sitton was a Southerner, born in Atlanta on Dec. 4, 1925. He grew up on a farm near Conyers, Georgia, just east of Atlanta. His father worked on railroads as a conductor and brakeman, and his mother was a schoolteacher.
He served in the U.S. Navy and Merchant Marine during World War II, and after the war entered Emory University, where he intended to major in business. He switched to journalism and became editor in chief of the student newspaper. He graduated in 1949, though not before first taking a job with International News Service, where he worked at night for his final three months of college. The next year, he joined United Press, where he worked first in the South, then for five years in New York.
In 1955, looking for a little foreign adventure, he went to Africa for the United States Information Agency as information officer and press attache at the American Embassy in Ghana. He was there when Ghana received its independence from Great Britain.
Sitton found that he missed journalism. He returned to the United States and worked for nine months as a copyeditor for The New York Times in New York, before the managing editor, Turner Catledge, summoned him one day to ask if he’d be interested in the job of Southern correspondent, based in Atlanta. The civil rights fight was heating up, and the Times wanted to replace its relatively staid reporter with a hard charger.
About the time he took the job, covering civil rights was becoming nearly as dangerous as reporting on war. Journalists typically were viewed by the local power structure as outside agitators who sympathized with the civil rights activists. Reporters were routinely threatened, sometimes beaten and occasionally killed.
Technically, Sitton lived in Atlanta with his wife, Eva, and their growing family, first two kids, then eventually four.
But mainly he was on the road or in the air, moving from one hot spot to another, sometimes living in hotels for weeks and trying not to get killed in the process.
In Mississippi, where he was one of the first two reporters to arrive after the murder of the three Freedom Riders, he and Karl Fleming of Newsweek interviewed a deputy on the courthouse lawn who later turned out to be one of the murderers. Sitton and Fleming began to draw crowds of white toughs wherever they went.
Sitton said he had to go to the manager of the motel where he and Fleming were staying and use the same tactic he employed to help the civil rights activists who would call him when they got in trouble.
“I told him, look, just pass the word that if they kill me, by God there will be 10 more just like me out of New York the next morning,” Sitton said. “I didn’t have any more trouble.”
Sitton was regarded by the other reporters covering civil rights stories then as their leader. Many even took to using the tiny, cut-down reporter’s notebooks he used to avoid attention in hostile white crowds. They called them “Claude Sitton notebooks,” but Sitton said he called them Mack Charles Parker memorial notebooks. Sitton covered the aftermath of the 1959 abduction and lynching by a white mob of Parker, who was black, in a particularly hostile town, Poplarville, Mississippi. Parker had been in jail, charged with raping a white woman.
In a 2014 interview Sitton said he couldn’t recall being afraid while covering a story.
“I didn’t have time to be scared,” he said. “Truth of the matter is, the fear came afterward. I remember driving out of McComb, Mississippi, down to New Orleans to catch a plane after one of those big showdowns about public transportation there in that little town; and thinking about it as I was driving along, I felt the hair rising on the back of my neck.”
Sitton said that he always felt lucky afterward to have gotten that role, at that time. “It was a key beat on The New York Times, and I considered it the best newspaper job in the world,” he said.
He was brought back to New York in 1964 and made national news director. It wasn’t long, though, before he was getting a full dose of the infighting among the Times’ famously political management ranks.
In 1968, the Daniels family, which owned The News & Observer in Raleigh, was looking for someone to replace Jonathan Daniels as editor, and asked Sitton down for an interview. The News & Observer, Sitton said, was one of the very few newspapers in the South whose news and editorial policies he liked, and it seemed like a good fit.
“We were looking for a strong news-oriented journalist, who had strong opinions, to be involved in both the news and the editorial process,” said Frank Daniels Jr., former president of The News and Observer Publishing Co.
And strong opinions they got.
Sitton immediately made it clear what tone he’d be taking. “Popularity is not a legitimate goal of a newspaper,” he told a group of business and political leaders just weeks after arriving.
Initially, his title was editorial director and vice president. Later he also was named editor of the N&O. His job was overseeing editorial and news pages of the N&O and the news in its now-defunct afternoon sister paper, The Raleigh Times. This meant he was in charge of both the opinion pages of the paper and the parts that were supposed to be free of opinion. The news and opinion responsibilities are now split among different editors.
In his 22 years at the helm of the N&O, Sitton helped transform the paper, said Ferrel Guillory, who was a reporter and then editorial page editor of the paper for Sitton, and is now a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
“I think it’s fair to say that Claude, along with Frank Daniels Jr., clearly brought The News & Observer into the modern era,” Guillory said.
Sitton frequently urged journalists to look at news more thoroughly. A newspaper, he said, “must interpret change. Mere reporting of isolated events is not enough.”
Newspapers had a crucial role in making the world better, Sitton believed, and part of forging a better society in his view was scrutinizing public figures who stole, cheated, were ineffective or otherwise didn’t measure up.
Among the reporters and editors at the newspaper, Sitton was famous for a hot temper and for pushing midlevel editors to focus their reporters on stories and topics he felt needed more attention, but also for backing his people vigorously.
Sitton won the Pulitzer for commentary in 1983 for a selection of his weekly Sunday columns in the N&O. The entries scrutinized a range of topics, including the environment, public schools, the influence of athletic booster clubs on universities and the doings of Sen. Jesse Helms.
In its report the Pulitzer jury wrote: “Mr. Sitton shows an extraordinary understanding of issues, nationally and locally. He is clear, forceful and convincing. He shows a great sensitivity for his environment and society in general.”
Sitton was elected to the Pulitzer board himself in 1985 and inducted into the North Carolina Journalism Hall of Fame at UNC-Chapel Hill two years later. Among his other honors were the George Polk Career Award, which he was awarded in 1991, and the John Chancellor Award for excellence in journalism in 2000.
After retiring, he moved back to Georgia, and for three years taught a seminar on press coverage of civil rights at his alma mater, Emory University.
He is survived by his wife, Eva Whetstone Sitton; two sons, Claude “Mac” McLaurin Sitton of Decatur, Georgia, and Clint Sitton of Atlanta; two daughters, Suzanna F. Greene of Raleigh and Lea Stanley of Philadelphia; and nine grandchildren.
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