U. honors famed journalist

Still hammering away at his typewriter, Bill Minor has battled too many challenges to let age get in his way. The 75-year-old veteran civil rights reporter -- who has survived Ku Klux Klan threats, rifle shots, burning crosses and 12 governors -- is still producing what he calls his "highly controversial" work in Mississippi, where he began his long career. Last night, the Annenberg Public Policy Center honored Minor for his 50 years of civil rights coverage with the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism at an award reception in the University Museum. Minor is the first recipient of the $25,000 award, which is named after the former NBC News reporter who began his career by covering the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957. Chancellor's death two years ago inspired his long-time friend and former news source, Ira Lipman, chairperson of the Memphis, Tenn.-based security-services firm Guardsmark Inc. and member of the Board of Overseers of the Wharton School, to endow the annual award. In addition to writing, Bill Minor has served as a news source for many reporters seeking information on the civil rights movement in Mississippi. And some of those very reporters came to honor him last night. One of them, former New York Times reporter Hedrick Smith, a Pulitzer Prize winner, described Minor as "a reporter's reporter." Minor became the Jackson, Miss., bureau chief for the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 1947 -- a post he would hold for almost 30 years -- at a time when no one knew a lengthy, violent battle over race would soon begin. "I was the one-man bureau covering a whole state," Minor told The Daily Pennsylvanian in an interview yesterday. A conversation with Minor is an entire history lesson in itself. He has reported on racial lynchings and murders, always listening carefully to his sources -- which he said was the key to his effectiveness -- and defying what he recalls as the "prejudice press" of the South at that time. He recalled covering the "worst crime that ever took place" -- the lynching of Mack Charles Parker, a black man accused of raping a white woman in Poplarville, Miss., in 1959. "He was in jail, and a mass of white men came into the jail, yanked him out and killed him," Minor said, adding that Parker's abduction from the jail was arranged by the deputy sheriff of the jail. "It was a huge FBI investigation as a result of it," he continued, "the first time the FBI made an extensive investigation into a civil rights killing in this country." Minor, along with the other reporters covering the story, was the target of much contempt from the residents of Poplarville. It would not be the last time Minor's work angered the locals. "By Mississippi standards, they call me a liberal," said Minor, who refers to himself as an "FDR Democrat." During the late 1950s, Minor declared himself in favor of school integration, and he stood out as a supporter of voting rights for blacks during the voter marches of the mid-1960s. In the mid-60s, when Mississippi had still had a law prohibiting alcohol, Minor campaigned loudly to repeal it. "I had for years campaigned against this archaic system of prohibition by showing the fallacy of the system and how it led to corruption and made us such a laughingstock of the nation," Minor said, adding that the law was repealed in 1966. When the Times-Picayune closed down its Jackson bureau in 1976, Minor refused offers to move up North and created an alternative newspaper called The Capital Reporter. "We were a hell-raising, investigating little newspaper, and we were the targets of abuse by the Klan and the local racketeering element," Minor said. "And the politicians didn't like us worth a darn." The newspaper survived several threats, acts of violence and even an advertising boycott before it was forced to fold in 1981. And Minor is still at it today. He writes a weekly column -- which he began in the 1970's -- that is syndicated in 40 newspapers around Mississippi, and he's "still controversial." "I'm not going to deny it," Minor said. "Progressives are the only ones I'm really fascinated by and those are the ones whose stories I try to tell the best I can." "I don't write for popularity," Minor added, reflecting on the attacks his writing has received in his Southern home over the years. "I don't think that's the correct objective for my journalism."