ATLANTA (AP) – Journalist Claude Sitton, who set the pace for reporters covering the civil rights movement in the South in the 1950s and ’60s and later won a Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, died Tuesday. He was 89.
Sitton’s son Clint said his father died Tuesday in Atlanta. He had been under hospice care with heart failure.
Sitton, a Georgia native, began crisscrossing the South for The New York Times in 1958 and became a leading figure among the reporters covering the civil rights struggle, said 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 had joined the Times after working as a wire service reporter and for the now-disbanded U.S. Information Agency, serving as a liaison between diplomats and the media. Klibanoff said Sitton felt determined to give an honest account of the racial struggle in his native South and catapulted the newspaper into a leading role in covering the movement.