In 1947, the New Orleans Times-Picayune sent a 25-year-old reporter Louisiana native to Jackson to become the newspaper’s one-man Mississippi bureau.
He was dispatched with just one instruction: “Go.”
It was the right instruction, primarily because it was the right man.
Thursday at Mississippi for University for Women’s Nissan Auditorium, journalist and filmmaker Ellen Ann Fentress screened her documentary, “Eyes of Mississippi,” which chronicles the experiences of that young reporter — Bill Minor, who at 93 is still a working journalist, writing a weekly syndicated column.
Although Minor reported on a wide variety of topics during his remarkable six-decade career, the documentary focused on his coverage of the Civil Rights movement.
While it would be inaccurate to call Minor a hero in the Civil Rights movement, a claim he would certainly never make for himself, there was an heroic quality to his reporting, especially in the earliest years of the movement in Mississippi. He did not make history, but he bore record of it. At a time when few Mississippi reporters had the courage, curiosity or, in many cases, the desire to tell the story of Mississippi’s civil rights struggle, Minor was there.
And that mattered.
“Bill Minor was the first to tell the story of what was happening in Mississippi,” noted Myrlie Evers, widow of Mississippi’s greatest Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers. “Medgar didn’t trust a lot of people. He trusted Bill. ”
“Until Bill Minor, blacks had no access to the media,” said Jackson physician Robert Smith, another leader in the movement.
At a time when many Mississippi newspapers weren’t content to simply ignore the movement, but openly ridicule it, Minor approached the topic and with great energy. His reporting was sparse, simple. He offered no opinions in his reporting, nor was his reporting geared toward evoking emotion.
Telling the story, was enough, and his reach extended far beyond Mississippi, not only into Louisiana where his stories appeared, but also in the New York Times and Newsweek where his stories, published without his byline, alerted the nation to the struggle in Mississippi that have gone unnoticed.
Minor stories after became major news events, as the national focus became transfixed on the events in Mississippi — from Freedom Summer and the violence that ensued to James Meridith and the bloody riots that followed, Minor was there, telling the story to a horrified nation.
He was there to cover the assassination Evers, There to tell the story of murdered civil rights workers in Philadelphia. He was there on the streets and in the courthouses, covering riots and protests and mayhem. He was there for the rise and fall of the White Citizen’s Council, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, but also there for the early stories of oppression and violence that might otherwise be forgotten.
Minor’s contributions are a reminder of the power of reporting.
He was, as one observer noted in the documentary, “water dripping on a rock” — tenaciously, methodically, relentlessly telling the stories until they could no longer be ignored.
Even in this day of “saturation coverage’ by a large media that works across multiple platforms, the impact of a single independent-minded reporter devoted only to telling a story simply, honestly, and thoroughly cannot be overstated.
They are too rare a bred. Mississippi was fortunate to have had one of them in Bill Minor — the right man for the right job at the right time.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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