By Roy Peter Clark
Senior Scholar and Vice President

Every day from 1960 to 1968, Gene Patterson wrote a signed daily column on the editorial page of the Atlanta Constitution. Many of those 3,000 pieces concerned race. Patterson and his mentor Ralph McGill sought to persuade their white kinfolk that legal segregation of the races was wrong, and that the South, in the name of justice, had to change.

You can imagine the response.

The Klan picketed the newspaper. Lester Maddox, who would become a segregationist governor of Georgia, took out ads to advertise his restaurant and condemn in crude language the mixing of the races. Signed and anonymous letters condemned Patterson and denigrated black citizens in the vilest way. Someone shot Gene's dog, Lizzy. For that day when a violent stranger might visit his office, Gene kept a ball-peen hammer handy in a desk drawer.

More than 40 years have disappeared since then, but not some of the incivility associated with race. So obnoxious were recent comments about presidential candidate Barack Obama, that CBS was moved to shut down a section of comments on its Web site.

The experience of journalists from the civil rights era helps us put "incivility" into some historical context.

Gene remembers that, when it came to letters to the editor, "the comments could be as derogatory of me as they wanted to be." He felt that part of the conversation about race required "strong representation of the other side," which meant that readers could and did advocate the continuing separation of the races, even to the point of making arguments about the inability of black children to succeed in public schools.

But providing opportunities for dissent did not require Patterson to abandon "certain standards of civilization." He felt a profound duty to "protect the commonweal from violence," and to remove from letters hateful and derogatory insults against what then would have been called the Negro race.

"I had control of the editing process," said Patterson, who could hold every letter in his hand and wield his red pencil before publication.

Gene says that he understands that when it comes to electronic comments to news Web sites and blogs, written anonymously and without responsibility, complete control of the editing process may no longer be possible, or in some cases desirable.

"There are cretins out there who go way beyond the pale of decency," Gene said, "and I just don't know what you do about that."

A red pencil and ball-peen hammer no longer seem enough.

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