Claude Sitton, 89, the New York Times reporter who set the pace for reporters covering the civil rights movement and later won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary, died Tuesday.
Sitton’s 1962 article described a voting rights meeting at a south Georgia church that was interrupted when the sheriff and his deputies entered. One smacked his flashlight into his palm while another ran his hand over his cartridge belt and revolver.
Sitton opened his account with a direct quote from the sheriff: “We want our colored people to go on living like they have for the last 100 years.”
After reading Sitton’s front-page report in the Times, then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy dispatched a team to Terrell County, Ga. The team sued the sheriff less than two weeks later, said journalist Hank Klibanoff, who co-authored “The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle and the Awakening of a Nation.”
“What made him the gold standard was that he went where other reporters didn’t go, and once he got there they followed,” said Klibanoff, former managing editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Sitton later served as the Times’ national news editor and became editor of The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C. In 1983, his commentary for that newspaper won the Pulitzer Prize.
According to his alma mater, Emory University, Sitton returned to Emory to teach in the early 1990s, served as a member of the Board of Counselors of Emory’s Oxford College and helped establish Emory’s journalism program in the mid-1990s.
Windell Middlebrooks, 36, an actor who gained TV commercial stardom as the beer delivery man who confiscated Miller High Life from undeserving snobs, has died, his family said Tuesday.
His credits included the TV series “Body of Proof,” “Cougar Town” and “Scrubs.” He is in the new Adam Carolla film “Road Hard.”
Richard Glatzer, 63, who co-wrote and directed the Alzheimer’s drama “Still Alice” alongside his husband, Wash Westmoreland, while battling ALS, died Tuesday in Los Angeles.
Diagnosed in 2011 with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease, the pair took on the project of “Still Alice” in a very early stage of Glatzer’s disease. Their film earned star Julianne Moore her first Oscar for her portrayal of an academic suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s.
