CURTIS WILKIE Writing History’s First Draft STORY BY ELLEN B. MEACHAM
O
n an April afternoon in 1967, a young man with a notebook stands just to the side of two men face-to-face, deep in intense discussion. One of them, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, has come to the Mississippi Delta town of Cleveland to see for himself the scale of the desperate hunger and poverty that pervades the region. The other man, local newspaper editor Cliff Langford, a vocal opponent of racial equality, has just confronted Kennedy, angry that this famous man has come to the poorest part of his town and brought the press attention that inevitably followed RFK. Langford is incensed at the notion that unemployment and hunger are a problem. Anyone in the Delta who wants to work can get a job, and anyone who wants food can get it, Langford asserts. As Langford speaks, the young reporter -- clean shaven, buttoned up, wearing a tie – folds his arms. And though his face remains largely impassive, he shoots a shrewd, sideways glance to a group of children close by. Curtis Wilkie, who retired in December from 18 years of teaching journalism in the School of Journalism and New Media, was that 27year-old reporter for the Clarksdale Press Register. He knew that Langford’s notion was belied by both the 1962 ,THE OLE MISS ARCHIVES
Graduated from Ole Miss and began reporting for the Clarksdale Press Register
1963 14
THE REVIEW 2021-2022
1964
Covered struggle for civil rights during Freedom Summer
official economic numbers fromhis own state and, most vividly, the faces of the rail-thin Black children standing in rags a few yards away. Wilkie’s knowing glance, captured on camera in the background of the confrontation, is a subtle tell, but one that foreshadows his life’s work. A lifetime as an eyewitness to history as it is made in the U.S and abroad. A lifetime penetrating the denial, spin, propaganda and pomposity of leaders and politicians, demagogues and dictators, seeking the truth and sharing it with readers. Covering Civil Rights Four years earlier, Wilkie had arrived at the Press Register for his first full-time reporting job after earning a journalism degree from of the University of Mississippi. His new position in Clarksdale, put Wilkie at an epicenter of the civil rights movement during the 1960s. During his time at the paper, Wilkie covered boycott and protests by the NAACP, 1964’s Freedom Summer and Mississippi’s violent response; as well as visits to the area by politicians and civil rights leaders, such, Martin Luther King Jr., and James Meredith. When Robert F. Kennedy toured the Mississippi Delta in 1967, Wilkie was there at each stop. In 1968, when King came to Mississippi to organize the Poor People’s Campaign, Wilkie spent 48 hours with him. Two weeks later, King was dead, slain by an assassin’s bullet. “I was covering the movement first-hand,” Wilkie said. “And seeing the Clarksdale police behaving the way they did, from then on, I became very sympathetic to the movement.”
Covered Robert F. Kennedy’s visit to the Mississippi Delta
1967
1968
Covered Martin Luther King, Jr. as he began organizing the Poor People’s campaign
Served as a Congressional Fellow for the American Political Science Association in Congress in Washington, DC
1969
