Bill Minor, journalist who was called conscience of Mississippi, dies at 94
Bill Minor, whose courageous reporting helped open Americans' eyes to everyday racial discrimination in the South in the 1960s and won him recognition as the "conscience of Mississippi," died March 28 in Ridgeland, Miss., outside Jackson. He was 94.
His death, at a hospice, was confirmed by his son Paul.
Mr. Minor was already a fiercely independent and fearless muckraker, exposing corrupt Mississippi politicians in The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, when his news articles and commentary emerged as the region's lonely but conspicuous witness to the fledgling civil rights movement and the brutal efforts by Southern politicians to suppress it.
His voice not only traveled from the newspaper's bureau at the state capitol in Jackson to neighboring Louisiana, but also reverberated nationwide. While serving as The Times-Picayune's capital correspondent, Mr. Minor was also a stringer, or part-time reporter, for The New York Times and Newsweek magazine.
"No Southern newspaperman has done more for civil rights and civil liberties than Bill Minor," Claude Sitton, another son of the South who covered the movement for The Times, once said. Historians have credited Mr. Sitton, who died in 2015, and another Times colleague, John Herbers, who died this month, with playing major roles in reporting the civil rights struggle.
Keywords
Minor
