exerpt

Before coming to Atlanta, I had been state editor of the Meridian Star, the largest daily newspaper in eastern Mississippi. After a year on the job I wrote about what police said was the accidental shooting of a 14 year old black child. Soon after the story was published, a black janitor came to me and said the shooting had not been accidental. It was, he said in low tones and looking over his shoulder, a deliberate killing of a young boy who had been arrested for trespassing and thrown into an adult jail where he was repeatedly raped.
One day on an outside work detail, the boy broke and ran. A white officer chased him, shooting at him three times. The third shot blew his head apart. The black janitor said there was an entire neighborhood of witnesses. He gave me names and addresses.
As state editor, I had discretion of writing local stories without clearing it with any other editor. So I went down an unpaved city street to the shabby Meridian neighborhood and interviewed witnesses. With courage and conviction, they let me identify them in the telling of the real story of the killing. I wrote an eight inch story. The presses rolled. At 5 a.m. the next morning I got a phone call from the managing editor who told me to get to the newspaper immediately. I knew what was about to happen.

When Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner went missing in the summer of 1964, the Star's coverage of the incident leaned heavily on the idea that it was hoax, and that the civil rights workers were probably in New York, living it up and having fun at the expense of the good people of Neshoba County. The Star was openly and proudly a white people's newspaper. Toward the rear of the first section was the single-column "Colored News." The paper's official policy in 1969 was never to run the photos of a local white and a local black on the same page. I was never comfortable or happy at the paper because of the racist cancer that ran through its entire operation.
I got to the Star before sunup and parked next to the replica 1928 Mercedes Benz roadster that was owned by "Crazy Billy," the name all of us gave the paper's boss. Oh crap, I remember thinking. The publisher's going to be in on it too. They’ve planned a predawn party for my execution. I entered the building and found both publisher and managing editor waiting for me, glowering like a pair of cobras eyeing a mouse.