The American journalist Ralph Emerson McGill (1898-1969) was the 1959 Pulitzer prize winner for his editorials on race, desegregation, and Southern politics--views that made him and the Atlanta Constitution major symbols of Southern liberalism.

Ralph McGill was born on February 3, 1898, on a farm in eastern Tennessee. When he was six the family moved to Chattanooga and lived on a farm bequeathed by his grandfather. McGill's father, who influenced his son with a passion for learning and who had changed his own name from Benjamin Wallace to Benjamin Franklin McGill, took a job as a salesman for a small heating and roofing company. The son's middle name came in honor of a friend who was a devotee of Ralph Waldo Emerson. McGill always had happy memories of his childhood and of his family, including his mother, Mary Lou Skillern McGill.

The region of his boyhood undoubtedly influenced McGill's later views...