William Winter: Bill Minor was 'a courageous newsman'

Bill Minor began covering Mississippi politics in 1947 when Theodore G. Bilbo was still a U. S. Senator.  That summer ushered in a half-century of events that now in their recalling makes for an almost incredible panorama of history that still seems unreal.  It has been our good fortune in this region to have had so perceptive and resourceful a journalist as Bill Minor to record and interpret those events for us.

Coming to Jackson after three years of combat duty as a naval officer aboard a destroyer in the Pacific following his graduation from Tulane, this intrepid young reporter assumed the position as the Mississippi bureau chief of the New Orleans Time Picayune.

He came along as some of the century's great stories were beginning to break, and they were breaking with hurricane-like force on the Mississippi political scene.  Some four months after his arrival in Jackson, the Truman civil rights manifesto signaled the beginning of the decades-long struggle for the overturn of Jim Crow and the Dixiecrat revolt of 1948.  These early developments were followed by the Brown decision of 1954, the passage of the Civil Rights Act ten years later and the Voting Rights Act a year after that.  And in between and related to these historic watershed events were the hundreds of intense local battles which involved both the worst kind of bestial violence and the most inspiring kind of raw courage.

Bill Minor covered them all or at least all that he knew about and could get to.  Because he enjoyed the respect and confidence of every conscientious public official and law enforcement officer, he was able to get behind the scenes on sensitive and controversial stories in ways that lesser reporters were unable to do.  At the same time, he was out front in blowing the whistle on faithless officials and causing governors and legislators to be more prudent than they might otherwise have been.

At a time when a "closed society" mentality seized Mississippi, this courageous newsman insisted on telling it like it was and in the process helped save us from some of our fears and paranoia.  Through the most painful and traumatic times such as the Meredith fiasco, the assassination of Medgar Evers, the long hot summer of 1964, and the Jackson State shootings of 1970, Minor brought clarity and objectivity in the reporting of events that others succeeded only in sensationalizing and inflaming.

But he wrote about more than the dark side of Mississippi politics.  His writings also reflected his own optimism about the state's promise and his intense admiration for so many of its people who overcame the hardship of poverty and inadequate educational opportunity to lead productive lives and become state and community leaders.

He maintained throughout his career a commitment to the ideal that it was a journalist's duty not only to report the facts, but to encourage people to think. Bill Minor did not always endear himself to many who read his columns because he did not hesitate to challenge some of the old shibboleths.  With an intimate understanding of the background and details of the public issues about which he wrote, he was able to provide a unique insight into how complex and often controversial questions were resolved.  He contributed greatly to the civic education of the region.

Through it all, he remained his own man never buckling to the pressures of powerful interests not even when they may have come from his own newspaper.  And he never lost his aplomb or sense of humor.  His jovial and self-deprecating personality kept his adversaries off balance and enabled him to have their respect if not always their favor.

He has been recognized nationally as one of the truly gifted and courageous journalists of his generation.  He always reminded us of how much progress we’ve made, but, in addition, how much more there is left to do.  Whether we know it or not, all of us are in his debt.

William Winter was the 58th governor of Mississippi.