Carolina Alumni Review - September/October 2007

GENE ROBERTS ’ 54

The editor of the Goldsboro News-Argus in the 1950s, Henry Belk — 6-foot- 7, blind and a dynamo in the newsroom — was always demanding to know why a competitor had gotten a story and his paper hadn’t. Always prodding his reporters to do better.

Belk insisted on vivid writing. “You aren’t making me see,” he would say. “Make me see.”

Often, Gene Roberts ’ 54 says, his writing was insufficiently descriptive to make Mister Belk see. It’s a story from his first newspaper job, in his hometown, that he likes to tell. And it is a lesson he never forgot — first as a reporter covering civil rights and the Vietnam War for The New York Times, then as the editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, when the paper won 17 Pulitzer Prizes in his 18 years at the helm.

“With Gene, you knew that he always wanted your best,” said Richard Ben Cramer, who won the 1979 Pulitzer for international reporting and went on to become a best-selling author. “He made you want to find the best story on earth and write the hell out of it.”

In April, Roberts, at 74, was awarded, along with Hank Klibanoff, the Pulitzer in history for their monumental account, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation.

Winning his own Pulitzer, after so many times leading the cheers for other recipients in the Inquirer newsroom, was perhaps the ultimate affirmation in Roberts’ long journalism career.

One reviewer, David K. Shipler, recognized that hard-won habit of digging down to the last detail and telling all. “With each gripping story of racial confrontation, every meticulous reconstruction of the perverse misuse of law, every account of vile acts committed by the segregationist press and courageous efforts by a few white Southern editors,” Shipler wrote, “this probing book reverberates with large lessons in democracy and justice.”

Roberts, now slowing his pace a little, may not be the last of the old-school newspaper guys. But he’s one they’ve all studied. He cut his teeth on the farm beat in eastern North Carolina, and he developed a sixth sense for opportunity — par-

laying his inventive reporting of the John Kennedy assassination into a job at the

Times.

As newspapers line up behind USA Today to pare down their stories for short attention spans, Roberts to this day champions the long piece, reported to the nth detail.

When associates called him quirky, he tried to live up to it. When a magazine article mentioned that he looked like a frog, he embraced it. Life in one stuffy, over-serious newsroom taught him to infuse his next one with levity. Levity, but always, always with the understanding that good journalism never stops being hard work.

Into the civil rights fire

The Race Beat covers an area near and dear to Roberts’ heart. He graduated from Chapel Hill with a degree in journalism in 1954 — the same month of the landmark Brown v. the Board of Education case — but considered going for his doctorate in medieval studies and becoming a professor before settling on a newspaper job. At the Goldsboro paper, and then at The Virginian-Pilot and The News & Observer, he saw firsthand how the South grappled with the changing racial landscape. One incident in particular left an indelible mark.

“In 1960, I was covering for The News & Observer sit-ins that were taking place in Greensboro and Durham,” Roberts said. “Martin Luther King decided to fly in, and I went over to Durham thinking I would be attending a student rally at a black church. When I got there, there were lots and lots of students, but they were all out in the yard. I discovered later that the reason they were in the yard was that middle-aged blacks had gotten inside the church an hour ahead of time to make sure they had a seat.

“Neither the students or the reporters could get in, but a deacon boosted me up a window, and I could watch the proceedings. Martin Luther King gave one of his classic speeches. This was when I became conscious of what was happening. Most of the people inside were women, and when they were asked for donations for the civil rights movement, they all pulled out their handkerchiefs, in which they kept their change, and brought out their hard-earned nickels, dimes and quarters. I left that night

thinking for the first time that massive change was going to come in the black community.”

That anecdote reflects the essence of Roberts’ approach to journalism: making connections, seeing the true story in the mundane. “Gene has phenomenal instincts for stories just waiting to be done,” said Klibanoff, who was a reporter for the Inquirer under Roberts and is now the managing editor for news at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “He’d tell us: ‘The status quo produces great stories. Just open your eyes and write what you see.’”

As both authors are Southerners — Klibanoff is from Mississippi — The Race Beat imparts a strong knowledge of the culture and nuances of the region. “I think we had a good sense of things,” Roberts said.