McGILL, Ralph Emerson

(b. 5 February 1898 near Soddy, Tennessee; d. 3 February 1969 in Atlanta, Georgia), reporter, editor, publisher, nationally syndicated political columnist, and civil rights campaigner.

McGill was the eldest of six children born to Benjamin Franklin McGill, a coal miner, and Mary Lou Skillern, a homemaker, on a farm in Igou's Ferry, Tennessee. A sickly child, he began his formal education at the age of eight, when he attended the Fourth District School of Highland Park, Chattanooga. As his health improved, McGill was made captain of the football team at the McCallie Preparatory School, Chattanooga, where he studied between 1913 and 1917. He attended Vanderbilt University between 1917 and 1922, taking time off between 1918 and 1919 to serve in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War I. During his college years McGill was a member of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) and the Sigma Chi fraternity. He played tackle on the football team, joined a literary group called the Fugitives (along with future novelist Robert Penn Warren and poets Allen Tate and Merrill Moore), and ran bootleg liquor to make extra money. He was a cub reporter for the Nashville Banner and wrote for the university paper the Hustler, where his talent for challenging authority began to emerge. One of his editorials for the Hustler accused the university trustees of embezzlement and won McGill a suspension. Although he did not graduate from Vanderbilt, over the course of his life McGill received fourteen honorary degrees, thirteen of which were awarded in the 1960s.

McGill continued to write for the Nashville Banner after college, and in 1929 he married Mary Elizabeth Leonard, with whom he had two daughters and a son. That same year he became assistant sports editor at the Atlanta Constitution, eventually progressing to executive editor in 1938. His first act as executive editor was to rule that the Constitution would always print the word Negro with a capital N, to give the title its proper authority. McGill was appointed editor in chief in 1942. The Atlantic Monthly called the Constitution under his leadership "one of the most influential newspapers on the Atlantic seaboard."

In the 1930s and 1940s McGill built a reputation as a staunch advocate for civil rights, becoming known as the "conscience of the South." He was critical of the "baronial autocrats" he saw corrupting and dominating the political systems of the South, using the position of "states' rights" to keep the South in "a backward and isolationist position." Yet although many southern readers found his editorials offensive, northern liberals thought McGill was timid and predictable. His reputation in the North was perhaps damaged by his technique of interspersing campaigns for civil rights and racial equality with lighthearted editorials. It was a technique that kept McGill in work, enabling him to become, by the late 1950s, one of the most influential and respected newspapermen in the United States. In 1959 he received a Pulitzer Prize for an editorial about the bombing of an Atlanta synagogue and was cited for his "long, courageous and effective editorial leadership."

By the 1960s McGill's influence on American politics and public life was profound. To avoid mandatory retirement as the editor of the Constitution, he became the publisher of the paper in 1960, a position that allowed him to continue writing his editorial column. By then he was directly involved in politics and a well-known figure in political and civil rights circles. In 1960 he accompanied Vice President Richard M. Nixon to Russia, met President-elect John F. Kennedy, received the Lauterbach Award "for distinguished service in the field of civil liberties," and was named a member of the Pulitzer Prize Advisory Board. In 1961 he was awarded an honorary LL.D from Harvard University. It was inscribed, "In a troubled time his steady voice of reason champions a New South."

McGill's wife died in 1962, leaving him to raise their only surviving child Ralph, Jr., then aged seventeen. They traveled to Japan on a trip funded by the Asian Foundation so that McGill could attend a series of seminars with Japanese university and newspaper people. He married Dr. Mary Lynn Morgan, a dentist twenty-three years his junior, in 1967.

In 1963 McGill received seven honorary degrees, served on presidential committees in the Kennedy Administration, and traveled to West Africa for the State Department to speak about race relations in America. He also published his fourth compilation of columns, The South and the Southerner.

In 1963 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., began his nonviolent demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, and it was a great embarrassment to McGill that the Constitution did not lead with coverage of these events. McGill was as widely known among black leaders as he was among white politicians. He had connections among journalists who kept him informed about groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), where the rhetoric of the Black Power movement was gaining support. After the bombing of an Alabama church that killed four children, McGill took a new, harder line with segregationists in his columns, raising his profile still further as a champion of civil rights and an outspoken critic of racial injustice in all its forms. In 1964 McGill was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson, the highest civilian honor in the United States, and in the following year received the Eleanor Roosevelt Humanities Award.

In the mid-1960s McGill became a committed supporter of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In characteristically direct style, McGill traveled to Vietnam in 1966 to talk with the authorities and visit the front line, an experience that confirmed his belief that the war was justified. On his return to the United States he spoke out in favor of continuing U.S. commitment to the war.

The assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 fell as heavy blows for McGill. A personal friend of Kennedy's, McGill saw his assassination as "but another exhibit of the steady growth of violence as part of the mosaic of our national culture." He traveled to Russia for a second time, returning to cover both political conventions of 1968.

McGill's career as a journalist covered some of the most turbulent years of American social history. As an outspoken advocate of liberty and freedom, he became one of the key commentators and campaigners of the 1950s and 1960s. His column was nationally syndicated for over twenty years. McGill summarized the ups and downs of the civil rights movement since 1954, "The critical national problems are our poor and our unprepared. Apartheid is not the answer. We have tried that already." McGill died of heart failure and is buried in Westview Cemetery in Atlanta.

McGill's papers are in the Woodruff Library, Emory University. His fourth book, The South and the Southerner (1963), is largely autobiographical. A biography of McGill by one of his colleagues at the Constitution is Harold H. Martin, Ralph McGill, Reporter (1973). McGill published several compilations of columns during the 1950s, including A Church, A School (1959), containing his Pulitzer Prize–winning editorial. Obituaries are in the Atlanta Constitution and New York Times (both 4 Feb. 1969).

Annmarie B. Singh