Journalist Wilson 'Bill' Minor dies; covered civil rights

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) - Wilson F. "Bill" Minor, a journalist who chronicled Mississippi through almost 70 years of change including its turbulent struggle over civil rights, has died.

Deborah Ashcraft of Lakewood Funeral Home in Jackson says the 94-year-old Minor died Tuesday.

Minor was a Louisiana native and served in World War II before he began covering Mississippi in 1947 for The Times-Picayune newspaper of New Orleans. He later ran his own weekly newspaper and wrote a syndicated political column.

Minor covered the 1955 acquittal of two white men accused of killing black teenager Emmett Till for whistling at a white woman, the 1962 riots after the court-ordered integration of the University of Mississippi, the 1963 assassination of Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers and the 1964 "Mississippi Burning" slayings of three civil rights workers.

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