Carolina Alumni Review - September/October 2007

options when things got tense: You could either blend in with the mob, or you could go the other way and look like FBI.”

Roberts found that when the race beat embraced not only Southern desegregation but Northern urban riots, the dynamics changed. “It could be disorienting. When you were in the South and needed, say, a phone to make a call or a place to write your story, you could ask someone in the black community. And they would help you. But in the North, you were fleeing from the black community and into the white community. Sometimes you would switch from North to South in the same week.”

When Roberts was lured away from the Times to the Inquirer, he was determined to apply what he had learned about writing closely observed journalism. Many of the Inquirer’s most celebrated articles were long investigative pieces or multi-lay-ered features, such as “a day in the life of AIDS.”

“It was at a very early point in the epidemic,” Roberts said. “The idea was to

show what a devastating effect it was having in the world.” The editors who brought him the idea, he recalled, “wanted to track what was going on in AIDS all over the world, but print it a week later to have time to accumulate the information and then write it. I agreed, but with the stipulation that it be printed in the next day’s newspaper. Everybody protested that it couldn’t be done. But if you were going to do a story around the world, at some place it was always daylight. Asia was 12 hours ahead of New York, so you really had 36 hours.”

If this bold, think-outside-the-box approach was one legacy of Roberts’ tenure at the Inquirer, so were his eccentricity and sense of the absurd. Jim Naughton, a colleague at the Inquirer, said, “Gene would have those spasms in which he would go off in some trancelike state and was oblivious to his surroundings. But he was thinking through some issue that would come to the rest of us two to three years later.”

Among the intensely loyal Inquirer
alumni, Naughton is known as the gate-

Jim Purks ’ 59, with notebook, is pictured on the cover of The Race Beat as an Associated Press reporter interviewing, left to right, the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1966.

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