The Ray Jenkins Story
by Judith Sheppard

You could say that Ray Jenkins is one of the luckiest journalists alive.

Almost as soon as he graduated from the University of Georgia in 1951, he started
showing up on the stage of major events of post-World War II America, any one of which most reporters would gladly call the biggest story of their careers.

For example: in 1954, while Jenkins worked the lowly cop beat for the Columbus Ledger, the Phenix City story burst open like
a very bad boil. Suddenly, he was a star reporter, covering the assassination of a hero and uncovering the almost incredible current of crime and violence running just under the placid surface of mill village life.

In 1955, when the Columbus newspapers won the Pulitzer Prize for public service—the journalism award that eclipses even other Pulitzers in honor—he was one of the three Ledger staffers who everyone knew had truly earned it.

It was his first job. He was 23.

Reporters envy people like Jenkins—the charmed ones, always there when news happens. Even Jenkins says it was his “great good fortune” to cover a story as socially significant as the O.J. Simpson saga of the ‘90s. “Obviously, luck plays a certain role in everything,” said Millard Grimes, who got Jenkins that Ledger job and has made no small mark on Southern newspaper history himself.

“But Ray has certainly always been in the center of things.”

Indeed. Jenkins’ career and the center of things intersected repeatedly: in Montgomery during the Civil Rights Movement; in the pages of The New York Times during Gov. George Wallace’s rise to national political power; in Jimmy Carter’s White House during the Iranian hostage crisis; at the Baltimore Evening Sun’s deathbed, when the beloved paper lost its circulation battle to its morning
counterpart.

Yet Jenkins is one of a few journalists with whom the conscience of the world has, finally, so caught up that most don’t comprehend how remarkable they were. It’s not news today that racism and political corruption are wrong. In those days, it sometimes was.

“Ray Jenkins is for real,” said former Alabama Gov. John Patterson, still close to the reporter who covered his father’s assassination and the ensuing slash-and-burn clean-up of what was known as “the wickedest city in America.” Albert Patterson, slated to become the state attorney general that year, was shot to death as he prepared to expose local and state corruption. John, just back from service in Korea, immediately took up his father’s crusade and was elected attorney general in his stead.

Surrounded by press, he trusted Jenkins’ work. “He is absolutely fearless, which makes a good newspaperman,” he said. “He is a man of great principle, and he didn’t flinch from anything.”

Jenkins, living now in a leafy Baltimore suburb, was born in Camilla, Ga., in 1930. His mother was unusually enlightened about race and higher education: “I can’t begin to say how different my mother was from the others,” he said. Although she thought newspaper work was “an odd thing to want to do,” she sent him to Georgia, where he met Grimes, who had all but grown up in the Ledger newsroom.

Even though he almost had to go home. “Even in 1951, you couldn’t live on $51 a week,” he remarked. It wasn’t a bad life for a young man in the booming ‘50s. The Valley was a place powered by twin economic cylinders: the textile mills, running night and day, and Fort Benning, whose lonely GIs were eager to spend their pay and whose top brass dominated the social scene.

Looking back, both he and Grimes seem bemused by the dichotomy of the place.

“Ray and I were young, and even though I was married at that time, we were pretty good friends,” recalled Grimes. “It was real funny. I never saw a lot of the corruption that was taking place in Phenix City. We went to nightclubs; we went there a lot. There were bands, and you could get a drink, which you couldn’t get in Columbus at the time. I guess things were happening in the back rooms.”

Jenkins’ editor, Bob Brown, recognized the incongruity, too. Brown once said that the Pulitzer committee didn’t know about the Ledger’s secret weapon—“Ray Jenkins, who participated in vice by night and covered it by day.”

(Jenkins ruefully acknowledges he was known by name in some juke joints, but he also attended St. Luke United Methodist Church, where he met and married Bettina Cirsovius, who’d arrived from Germany in 1952.)

Carroll Lisby, the retired Ledger editorial page editor, remembers Jenkins vividly. “He had stories in the paper practically every day for some months,” he said. “He was kind of dashing—very self-assured, very aggressive in his coverage.” That might have been partly bravado. Phenix City was the nation’s biggest story, media had descended from all over the world, and Jenkins wan’t yet five years out of school. Brown bolstered his courage. “He said, ‘I know you’re very nervous, covering this story. I know there are some hotshot reporters covering it, too,’” Jenkins remembers. “‘But I’m not asking if you can cover the story. I’m telling you to cover the story.’”

Jenkins believes one exclusive both sealed the Ledger’s Pulitzer bid and cemented the tough, take-no-prisoners clean-up. In a July 29, 1954 story, former Phenix City Police Chief Pal Daniel and 14 officers told him on the record they’d been ordered not to interfere in crime syndicate matters. Proving that local government couldn’t be trusted, the story vindicated the National Guard takeover
of the city.

It wasn’t until Russell County Deputy Sheriff Albert Fuller was convicted of murdering Albert Patterson that Jenkins caught up with the century’s most astonishing development: the Supreme Court’s May 1954 ban on segregation. He began writing stories from a local world that seemed invisible to white newspapers—the accomplished, complex culture of Southern blacks. Neither these, nor Brown’s increasingly liberal editorials, were welcomed. Brown resigned. In 1960, Jenkins became city editor of the Alabama Journal—on the same day that John Patterson was elected governor.

Still, Jenkins says, there’s praise due to Columbus publishers. “They were willing to put up the money to cover the Phenix City story, to pay seven reporters, two of them full-time, to cover it,” he recalled. “When the murder trials moved to Birmingham, that imposed a really heavy expense on the paper ... I give them great credit for giving us the money to cover the story and backing us up.” (In fact, in 1953 the Ledger had become the first Southern paper to call a black woman “Mrs.” in a news story.)

Jenkins’s 20 years in Montgomery put him next to history and its makers: the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., George Wallace, the Freedom Riders, Judge Frank Johnson, marchers from Selma, Ku Klux Klan members. He knew everybody. Harvard made him a prestigious Nieman Fellow. He wrote on Southern culture and politics for The New York Times. He earned a law degree. Briefly, he was a special press liaison for President Jimmy Carter—and then the Iranian hostage crisis hit. “I was in over my head at once,” he recalled.

After that, being editorial page editor at the Baltimore Evening Sun—the seat once occupied by the iconic H.L. Mencken—seemed uneventful. “I knew I was presiding over the Sun’s end,” he recalled; afternoon papers were rapidly dying out (just as the Ledger did in 1988 and the Alabama Journal in 1992). In 1997, he published Blind Vengeance: The Roy Moody Mail Bomb Murders, about the assassination of Judge Robert Vance of Georgia.

Oddly, Jenkins is best known in journalism history as the editor whose casual interest in a newspaper ad led to Sullivan vs. The New York Times, a Supreme Court ruling journalists rank second only to the First Amendment. (He showed the ad to Montgomery Advertiser editor Grover Hall, who despised the Times and urged a Montgomery official to sue for libel; the Times won.) And many books and texts have drawn on his rich, intensive experiences in civil rights era Montgomery.

But he’ll always be the dashing reporter in one black-and-white photo that still makes both Patterson and Grimes chuckle—for different reasons. On May 6, 1952, Jenkins was watching civic activists Hugh Britton, Hugh Bentley and his son Hughbo monitor a Phenix City election when thugs began beating them on the sidewalk. Several newsmen, including fellow reporter Tom Sellers, were assaulted; Jenkins was shoved. A Ledger photographer captured it.

“Now, that was a big mistake,” said Patterson, still amused. “They made themselves a real adversary there.”

For Grimes, the fun is Jenkins’ serendipitous appearance in such an artifact. “It’s a famous picture of Ray. There he was, just standing around, and it happened,” he said with a laugh. “It was just the luckiest thing.”

But luck is odd. Philosophers might argue that history, like the fall of that famous tree reverberating in the forest, happens only when someone is “lucky” enough to be there to record it. Journalists might argue that a reporter could “luck out” on one historic story, maybe two. After that, even skeptics admit that the journalist has earned every front-row seat and footnote to history he gets.

Jenkins remains what Grimes calls a “Georgia boy”—visiting the state about once a year, still cooking cornbread, collards and seafood gumbo in the handsome book-lined home where he and his wife also garden and entertain their children and grandchildren. He’s just reread Crime and Punishment and Huckleberry Finn. He’s still the consummate political observer.

In fact, that’s one more way he’s luckier than many of those contemporaries.

“I was totally surprised at the emergence of Barack Obama,” he said. “I would have thought it would be 20 or 30 years more before we had a viable black candidate ... As I watched him at his inauguration, my thoughts were, what a pity that so many people I had known and covered—people like (Alabama activists) Cliff and Virginia Durr and, yes, Martin Luther King Jr.—weren’t here to see the fruits of their labor.”

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