William A. Emerson, Jr.

William Austin "Bill" Emerson Jr. (February 28, 1923 – August 25, 2009) was an American journalist who covered the Civil Rights Movement as Newsweek's first bureau chief assigned to cover the Southern United States and was later editor in chief of The Saturday Evening Post.

Background

Emerson was born on February 28, 1923, in Charlotte, North Carolina and moved with his family to Atlanta.

Career

Emerson enlisted in the United States Army and trained, in part, at Camp Ritchie among the Ritchie Boys. In War time, he served in the China Burma India Theater of World War II.

Newsweek In 1953, the year before the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, Emerson was named by Newsweek as its first bureau chief responsible for covering the South. In that role, Emerson witnessed the "years of resistance and violence" that ensued following the end of segregation in public schools and the start of the fight for civil rights for African Americans. In that role, Emerson covered school integration battles across the South, including in such cities as New Orleans and Memphis, Tennessee, and provided his direct observations of a woman trying to take her child to school and encountering a crowd spitting and yelling at them. He wrote about Ku Klux Klan cross burnings in Florida and followed the Montgomery bus boycott that began in 1955 with the ascension of Martin Luther King Jr. as a leader in the movement. A few months later, he reworked the magazine's issue covering the John F. Kennedy assassination to include recollections by his predecessor Dwight D. Eisenhower and by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., with a cover portrait of Kennedy by Norman Rockwell, all completed to publish the issue on time. As part of the New Journalism of the 1960s, Emerson had articles from such non-traditional authors as James Meredith, who wrote about his experiences as the first African American student at the University of Mississippi. In a meeting with employees after the magazine's closure had been announced, Emerson thanked the staff for their professional work and promised "to stay here and see that everyone finds a job". At a March 1969 postmortem on the magazine's closing, Emerson stated that The Post "was a damn good vehicle for advertising" with competitive renewal rates and readership reports and expressed what The New York Times called "understandable bitterness" in wishing "that all the one-eyed critics will lose their other eye".

Later life

Emerson later joined the faculty of the University of South Carolina, where he taught journalism.