By Teresa K. Weaver

In a time when courage is measured by opening your quarterly 401(k) statement, it's nice to meet Gene Patterson. He's a gentle reminder of where we've been and where we're heading, all these years later.

Patterson was editor of The Atlanta Constitution from 1960 to 1968 -- not exactly a peaceful, uneventful time here in the Deep South. For those eight years, Patterson wrote a column every day.

Every single day.

The best 122 of those columns are collected in a new book, "The Changing South of Gene Patterson: Journalism and Civil Rights, 1960-1968," edited by Roy Peter Clark and Raymond Arsenault (University Press of Florida, $24.95). What emerges from these individual pieces is not the career history of one newspaperman, but a beautifully nuanced portrait of a community, a region and a people at an undeniable turning point.

Courtesy of Gene Patterson Gene Patterson, right, with his mentor, Ralph McGill.

"I see what you're doing," one reader accused. "You're trying to make us think we're better than we are."

Patterson approached race in much the fashion that his mentor, Ralph McGill, did: He never wrote down to his readers. He urged common sense, common decency and simple tolerance as the Old South struggled to reinvent itself.

"Great journalism is the confluence of talent and opportunity," says editor Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists that owns the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times. "And Gene's talent was matched very powerfully by the challenges presented to this community between 1960 and 1968."

Born in 1923 in Adel, Ga., just north of the Florida border, Patterson was the son of a bank cashier and a schoolteacher. He earned a journalism degree from the University of Georgia in 1943, did his duty in the Army and then forged a career in newspapering -- in Temple, Texas; Macon; and with the United Press, in South Carolina, New York City and London. He joined the staff of the Constitution in 1956, where he worked beside McGill and succeeded him as editor in 1960, when McGill was bumped up to the publisher's office.

Gene Patterson Resources

The Making of... Roy Peter Clark describes how "The Changing South of Gene Patterson" came to be. Jan. 22, 2003 Lessons for Journalists Wisdom from Patterson's work for a new generation of journalists. Jan. 22, 2003 The Preacher and the Editor Roy Peter Clark on Patterson's correspondence with Martin Luther King, Jr. From the St. Petersburg Times. Jan. 19, 2003 Courage to Seek Change Gregory Favre on Patterson's legacy. Nov. 18, 2002 Inviting Change, Day by Day The AJC's Teresa K. Weaver discusses Patterson's life. Nov. 10, 2002 Patterson's Columns A Flower for the Graves About the 1963 Birmingham church bombing. Sept. 16, 1963 She Paid $7.75 and Sent Thanks About a minor -- but in its way, remarkable -- traffic accident. Sept. 13, 1960

At 77, Patterson still carries himself like a military man. He always seems to be on the verge of smiling, and he often refers to himself in the second person.

"Every day, you had to have an idea. You kept your pockets stuffed with quotations and ideas and turns of thought, famous sayings that you could credit and work into your column. At laundry time you had an awful lot of chewed-up paper in your pockets."

The beauty of this collection of columns is not so much in the big, culture-shifting morality lessons as in the small moments: the enterprising kid who sets up a Coca-Cola stand across from the golf course, the proper technique for thumping a water-melon, the creeping tenacity of kudzu, the sheer power of nature:

The wind rocked the car as it moved. It whipped fishponds into surf. A barn waved a strip of its tin roof at passersby.

"Those pieces ... shed a light on the culture," Clark says. "And I think they also had the effect of continuing to persuade Gene's audience that he was speaking to them as one of them."

In some columns, Patterson used a casual conversation or an irate letter to the editor as a launching point. He talked to flight attendants about Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, and he talked to schoolteachers about how to prepare children for this great change called desegregation.

That variety of voices helped Patterson achieve one of journalism's nobler goals: Writer and political pundit Walter Lippmann called it putting a community in conversation with itself.

"When a policeman shoves people around, it frequently makes news," Patterson began a column in 1960. "This is not that kind of story."

He went on to tell of a woman who was involved in a minor traffic accident in Thomaston, where a courteous police officer ticketed her and sent her on her way. She wrote a letter to the editor, commending the officer for his professionalism. Only at the end of Patterson's column do we learn the real reason he found this pleasant exchange extraordinary: The policeman was white and the driver black.

A sea change on a small scale.

The columns in this collection are arranged chronologically, showing a steady evolution in Patterson's thinking and his community's receptiveness. It's a fascinating progression.

"The secret of column writing, I learned from Mr. McGill...," Patterson says. "You've got to keep moving around."

Patterson wrote dispatches from the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, from the streets of Saigon, from the March on Washington, from Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, where a bomb killed four young black girls in the fall of 1963:

A Negro mother wept in the street Sunday morning in front of a Baptist church in Birmingham. In her hand she held a shoe, one shoe, from the foot of her dead child. We hold that shoe with her.

That column was so remarkable, Walter Cronkite asked Patterson to read it on the "CBS Evening News."

Photo by Robin Sloan Gene Patterson at the Poynter Institute.

"I deliberately wrote to the white readers of the Constitution," Patterson recalls, "because they were the ones who needed persuading ... And these were my kinfolks ... I just felt the conversation was between them and me."

As an issue, civil rights still defines us, and we still don't like to talk about it.

"We've fallen back exhausted," Patterson says. "The marches are over, the laws have been repealed, the acts have been passed by Congress ... So what's left to do? Everything. The story has not ended. But this is your century, not mine. Mine was the 20th."

Patterson left the Constitution in 1968, spent three years at The Washington Post and a year teaching at Duke University before being named editor of the St. Petersburg Times. He remained there until his retirement in 1988.

Four years ago, he lost his wife, Sue, and the subject still hurts.

"After the first year, it becomes a little more bearable," he says. "You don't walk around the house and suddenly see something that makes your heart sink."

In his second year without Sue, Patterson put himself on the waiting list for a retirement community on the edge of the Duke campus in Durham, N.C., about half an hour from his daughter, Mary, and three granddaughters.

"The closer I get, though, the more I'd like to stay where I am," Patterson says. "There's something curiously comforting about living in the house that my wife decorated. It gives me a comforting feeling to look at the pretty way she did things ... the way she hung pictures, the way she decorated a room. It's all there. And I'm surrounded by that."

Patterson reads the Times papers every day -- New York and St. Pete -- cover to cover, although he has finally given himself permission to skip "the uninteresting stuff." He admires a handful of opinion writers but finds much of today's editorial discourse shrill and unproductive.

"There's an awful lot of bad opinion writing going on out there," he says. "Ideological stuff, predictable stuff. You might as well put 'I am a conservative' or 'I am a liberal' in the byline."

Back in the day, Patterson was a Southern liberal, a label that bestowed all sorts of baggage -- and still does. But above all, Patterson was a writer. And he practiced his craft, on deadline, every day.

This article originally appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.