Content area
Full text
Ralph McGill: A Biography. By Barbara Barksdale Clowse. (Mason: Mercer University Press, 1998. viii, 315 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8G544612-6.)
As editor and columnist for the Atlanta Constitution from the 1940s through the 1960s, Ralph McGill was the South's best-known journalistic interpreter. He was always on the attack against the Ku Klux Klan and misbehaving Georgia politicians, but it was not until the eve of the Supreme Court's 1954 school decision that McGill exchanged his fiery moderation for a firm stand against racial separation.
McGill came from a hardscrabble farm in the eastern Tennessee hill country, not from the cotton South. McGill read biography and history and played football. Dropped from Vanderbilt University, he covered sports and everything else he could for the Nashville Banner and the Atlanta Constitution....