‘I can’t imagine a better way to make a living than as a journalist’ Florida – Arabstoday Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and civil rights advocate Eugene Patterson has died in Florida aged 89, The Washington Post has reported. The cause and exact date of his death was not reported .The World War II veteran began his journalism career while serving in the Army and after the war at a newspaper in Texas near his army post. By the 1960s he was serving as editor of the Atlanta Constitution where we wrote an influential daily column that frequently criticised the prevailing system of racist segregation in the region, The Post reported.
In one of his most memorable columns, he argued that all Southern white people were complicit in the deadly 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. In the piece, he painfully described the photograph of an African-American woman holding the shoe of her slain daughter at the scene of the bombing.
"We hold that shoe with her," he wrote. "Every one of us in the white South holds that small shoe in his hand."
Patterson won the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing while working at the Constitution, the Post reported.
He became the managing editor of The Washington Post in 1968 as well as chairman of the Poynter Institute, an internationally-respected not-for-profit journalism school in Florida.
After leaving his final post at the St Petersburg Times, Patterson wrote a farewell column, saying "I can't imagine that there is a better way to make a living than as a journalist.”
Source: UPI