Time called him "the conscience of the South." His profession gave him journalism's highest award, the Pulitzer Prize. The nation's universities showered him with honorary degrees. The Ku Klux Klan named him "Southern enemy number one." Many readers peppered him with hate mail. One writer noted that he was often treated in the South "much like some social disease--not to be discussed in public." No matter how one may have felt about Ralph McGill, however, one would have to agree with his biographer, who said that in the almost forty years McGill wrote for the Atlanta Constitution, "the paper, the town, and the South he loved and lectured and chastised and tried to lead out of its old ways, all were moved and shaken and changed because of him."

Ralph Waldo Emerson McGill was born to Benjamin Franklin and Lou Skillern McGill on 5 February 1898 in an eastern Tennessee...