Working as a political columnist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution can feel like being a rookie quarterback for the Georgia Bulldogs — you’re following legends and heroes who were the best of the best, and hoping to live up to the standard they set.
They won Pulitzer Prizes and lifetime achievement awards. They’re in Halls of Fame and history books. One, Ralph McGill, even won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor, for his columns during the fight for civil rights.
Every New Year’s Day, I stop and spend some time with the columns of a few of the people who came before me. I usually do it just for fun. But this year I’m doing it to prepare for what’s ahead — a presidential election year, with Georgia as a key battleground state, and the possible trial of former President Donald Trump in Fulton County. Atlanta has seen a lot in its day, but this will be something new.
If reading the AJC’s columnists tells you one thing, it’s that Georgia has known turmoil and tumult before and so much of what was true in Georgia in the past remains true today.
Antisemitism rocked Atlanta in 1958 when the Temple on Peachtree Street was bombed by white supremacists. Ralph McGill’s famous column for The Atlanta Constitution the next day, “A Church, a School,” declared the blame belonged not just to the “rabid, mad-dog minds” that planted the dynamite, but also to the leaders in the South who had let a culture of lawlessness and racism fester.
“This is a harvest,” he wrote. “It is the crop of things sown.”
McGill’s 1968 column, “A free man killed by white slaves,” chronicled the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“At the moment the triggerman fired, Martin Luther King was the free man,” he wrote on the front page of the Constitution. “The white killer (or killers) was a slave to his own sense of inferiority, a slave to hatred, a slave to all the bloody instincts that surge in a brain when a human being decides to become a beast.”
Gene Patterson succeeded McGill as editor of the Constitution and wrote editorials for both the Constitution and the afternoon Atlanta Journal.
Patterson wrote daily editorials for eight years calling out segregation in the South and pushing Georgia to be better than its neighbors. Sometimes Georgia rose to the occasion. Sometimes it did not. Patterson was there to declare which was which.
“This is Georgia,” he wrote in a column about Louisiana’s school segregation. “She can do better than that.”
His famous “Flowers for the Graves” column about the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham in 1963 won a Pulitzer Prize, too.
“A Negro mother wept in the street Sunday morning in front of a Baptist Church in Birmingham,” he wrote. “In her hand she held a shoe, one shoe, from the foot of her dead child. We hold that shoe with her.”
The theme of race has dominated the pages of the AJC’s editorials because it has dominated Georgia’s political and power structures, too. But in those same columns, you’ll see the recurring themes of honesty and courage, or lack thereof, in elected leaders.
Cynthia Tucker won her Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for calling out former Democratic U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney for some of the same theatrics and conspiracies that Republicans like U.S. Marjorie Taylor Greene have adopted in the years since.
9/11 was an inside job, McKinney suggested. The U.S. Capitol Police can’t be trusted. Greene has made similar statements. It’s “confrontational rhetoric that pleases only true believers,” Tucker wrote at the time.
Tucker also documented the ongoing fight over voting rights in Georgia, a battle that continues to this day.
“It is not reserved for the rich or the powerful, those who are tall or those who are pretty, the intellectually gifted or the musically inclined,” she wrote of voting. “It is a fundamental right of every American citizen 18 and older. The U.S. Constitution says so. Several times.”
Of course, I go to my predecessor Jim Galloway’s columns far more than once a year, because Jim had the unique ability to declare a truth before it happened. He warned — often — that the language of revolution will bring revolution eventually, and that it’s happening as we speak.
On Jan. 3, 2021, three days before the attack on the U.S. Capitol, Jim wrote that the apocalyptic warnings coming from Republicans in the 2020 campaigns, including Georgia’s two U.S. senators at the time, were about more than riling up voters ahead of their runoffs against Democrats two days later.
“The prize that comes....is permission to do things that would otherwise be out of bounds,” he wrote of Trump and others who warned that electing Democrats would be, quite literally, the end of the world.
“They will urge the vice president of the United States to overturn the votes of the electoral college on Jan. 6. To what end doesn’t matter. If there is no tomorrow, there are no consequences.”
Three days later, a mob in the Capitol hunted for Vice President Mike Pence. Jim had seen the seeds of the violence planted months and years before and said so.
Taken together, the columns remind me that while the parties in power may change in Georgia, human nature really never does.
Truly great columnists also remind us to be honest. To be brave. To speak the truth when we see it, even if you’re the only one speaking up. Others spoke before us and the state and country are better off because of it . We owe it to them to do the same.
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